WHY A CRIME OF ECOCIDE?
Unlike suing and fining corporations for environmental damage (companies may simply budget for this), making ecocide a crime creates an arrestable offence. It makes those individuals who are responsible for acts or decisions that lead to severe environmental harm liable to criminal prosecution. This creates:
Deterrence: top level decision-makers in government and industry will be far more careful and conscious about what they sign off, while investors and insurers will steer clear of projects likely to prove criminal.
Reinforcement of existing laws: naming the worst harms as crimes will help all environmental laws to be taken seriously
A level playing field: those doing the right thing will no longer struggle uphill while the less scrupulous pass damage and its costs on to nature, communities and governments
Support for multilateral agreements: with the enforceable underpinning of criminal law, non-binding agreements (Paris, Kunming-Montreal) will become easier to adhere to
Cultural shift: criminal law draws moral lines, and will help to create a healthy societal taboo around mass damage to nature
HOW CAN ECOCIDE BECOME AN INTERNATIONAL CRIME?
Right now, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) lists four international crimes:
Genocide
Crimes Against Humanity
War Crimes
Crimes of Aggression
The Statute can be amended to add a fifth crime: ECOCIDE.
A STRAIGHTFORWARD PROCESS
1. Proposal
Any state or group of states which has ratified (officially agreed to) the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) may propose an amendment. There are currently 124 of these “States Parties”.
[In December 2019 the Pacific ocean Republic of Vanuatu urged all states parties to consider adding a 5th crime of ecocide to the Statute.]
2. Negotiation
Once a proposal is on the table, all States Parties may contribute to the discussion in order to arrive at a final amendment text. This process is open-ended, but historically has taken anything from 2 to 10+ years.
3. Adoption
This requires consensus at an Assembly of States Parties, or, if a vote has to be taken, requires at least a 2/3 majority (currently 83/124). All states have an equal vote. Once the law is adopted into the Statute, the crime exists (even if it is not yet enforceable). This gives it immediate moral power.
4. Ratification
States Parties can then ratify (officially submit their agreement), and the ICC has jurisdiction over the crime in that country one year later. Ratifying states will likely transpose the crime into their own penal codes.
Beyond that, under universal jurisdiction principles, any ratifying nation may, on its own soil, arrest a non-national for ecocide committed elsewhere, as long as it considers the crime to be serious enough.
