Türkiye: MPs Advance Ecocide Law
Summary
Turkiye’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has supported a citizen-led petition to criminalise ecocide nationally. The petition was presented to parliament on 28 November 2023, after accumulating close to 29,000 wet signatures.
The momentum for this proposal comes amid growing national concern over environmental disasters, including ongoing cyanide pollution from a gold mine in the province of Iliç, and a recent landslide at the site, both of which have brought the term “ecocide” into sharper focus in Turkish public debate.
In December 2024, citizens took legal action against the Turkish Parliament’s Petition Committee for failing to process the ecocide petition within the formal timeframe. Although the case was not successful, the presiding judge acknowledged the importance of the issue, underscoring growing judicial awareness and sensitivity toward recognising ecocide as a crime.
Significantly, Orhan Sarıbal, CHP MP and Deputy Chair of the party, submitted a draft ecocide law to parliament in October 2023. His proposal sought to regulate public bodies via administrative law, rather than amending the penal code. His initiative was initially motivated by the alarming emergence of ‘sea snot’ (mucilage) in the Sea of Marmara in 2021, which signaled a major ecological imbalance.
In a recent development, Nimet Özdemir MP, also from the Republican People's Party (CHP), introduced a separate ecocide bill, directly proposing criminal penalties for severe environmental destruction. Her proposal, submitted in March 2025, aims to embed the crime of ecocide in Turkey’s penal code, aligning more closely with international efforts to recognise ecocide as the fifth core crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In a further sign of growing political support in Türkiye, calls for criminalising ecocide have also been backed by members of several other political parties, including İbrahim Akın MP of the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), as well as representatives from the İYİ Party and the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), reflecting increasing cross-party recognition of the need for stronger legal protections for nature.
You can explore the origins of the citizen-led ecocide law petition here, and read the full parliamentary proposals from MP Orhan Sarıbal (October 2023) and MP Nimet Özdemir (March 2025) here and here, respectively.