Federal Act
on the Protection of Waters
(Waters Protection Act, WPA)

¹The pen­alty shall be a cus­todi­al sen­tence of up to three years or a mon­et­ary pen­alty for any per­son who wil­fully:⁸³

a.

un­law­fully dis­charges in­to wa­ters sub­stances which may pol­lute wa­ter dir­ectly or in­dir­ectly, al­lows them to in­filt­rate or stores or spreads them out­side wa­ters in such a way as to cre­ate a wa­ter pol­lu­tion risk (Art. 6);

b.

in his or her ca­pa­city as the per­son re­spons­ible for an in­stall­a­tion which con­tains li­quids which may pol­lute wa­ter does not take the steps in terms of struc­tures and equip­ment re­quired by this Act or does not keep these in work­ing con­di­tion and thereby pol­lutes wa­ter or cre­ates a pol­lu­tion risk (Art. 22);

c.

does not main­tain the re­quired wa­ter en­dow­ment laid down by the au­thor­it­ies or does not take the re­quired meas­ures for wa­ter pro­tec­tion be­low a point of with­draw­al (Art. 35);

d.

un­law­fully ar­ti­fi­cially re­in­forces or un­law­fully cor­rects wa­ter­courses (Art. 37);

e.

cov­ers or cul­verts a wa­ter­course without a per­mit or con­trary to the con­di­tions of such a per­mit (Art. 38);

f.

in­tro­duces sol­id sub­stances in­to a lake without a per­mit from the can­ton­al au­thor­ity or con­trary to the con­di­tions of such a per­mit (Art. 39 para. 2);

g.

ex­tracts or un­der­takes pre­par­at­ory ex­cav­a­tions for the ex­trac­tion of gravel, sand or any oth­er ma­ter­i­als without a per­mit or con­trary to the con­di­tions of such a per­mit (Art. 44).

² In cases of neg­li­gence, the of­fend­er shall be li­able to a mon­et­ary pen­alty of up to 180 daily pen­alty units.⁸⁴