Navarra votes on ecocide: Spanish region in favour of a new international crime

On Thursday 28th April the Navarran Foral Parliament resolved to:

"(...) study a policy of promoting the amendment of the Rome Statute, in agreement with the other European partners, as a way of including the recognition of ecocide as an international crime, as well as to assess the implementation of procedural and criminal reforms consistent with this objective in our domestic law."

The motion was proposed by Ainhoa Aznárez Igarza, member of the Foral Parliamentary Group Podemos-Ahal Dugu, and passed with only one small amendment.

The accompanying Explanatory Memorandum mentions the 1972 Stockholm Conference, the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the 1987 Brundtland Commission, the 1992 Rio Conference, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the European Directive 2008/99/EC (on environmental protection through criminal law) as examples of the growing global concern in terms of international environmental law and the need to protect the environment.

Furthermore, it points out that these types of crimes, despite being described and subject to increasingly dissuasive penalties, have a high rate of impunity, and their investigation and prosecution are very complex. Therefore, the motion states:  "A new technique is needed for the construction of crimes against the environment that really guarantees the protection of the protected subject and the punishment of those who damage it, whether intentionally or negligently."

The initiative is fully aligned with the Stop Ecocide campaign as it seeks to have ecocide recognized as the fifth Crime against World Peace and Security under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The motion also takes up the legal definition of ecocide provided by the Independent Expert Panel convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, according to which ecocide "unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts".