Aligning UN Goals and legal norms in a case weighting system: a case study on environmental crimes in Italy

The United Nations agenda encompasses 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aimed at addressing challenges such as reducing inequality, promoting climate action, and building stronger institutions to ensure peace and justice for all nations. This article explores the idea that enhanced judicial efficiency can contribute to the achievement of multiple SDGs. Case weighting, a critical factor in achieving such efficiency, influences the allocation of justice resources and can expedite the resolution of specific criminal cases. Traditionally, case weights are assigned manually, which can lead to inconsistencies and inaccuracies. To address the limitations of manual methods, we introduce an innovative automatic case weighting system (CWS) designed to calculate the weight of high-impact criminal cases, thereby ensuring equitable distribution of judicial resources and facilitating progress toward the SDGs. In this study, we create a novel weighting scheme compatible with Italian criminal law and demonstrate its functionality through a real-case scenario. The proposed scheme could be employed within the Italian first-instance criminal court. We illustrate how to use legal norms to assign weights more accurately to the most dangerous crimes, and suggest incorporating the SDGs as supplementary indicators, enabling policymakers to prioritize the achievement of one or more UN goals. As a case study, we apply our proposed solution, the Criminal Case Scale, to weigh environmental crimes within the Italian first-instance criminal court. This approach highlights the potential for advanced case weighting systems to enhance judicial efficiency and contribute to the attainment of the United Nations’ SDGs while overcoming the limitations of manual case weighting methods.