Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa want international criminal court to class environmental destruction as crime alongside genocide
Three developing countries have taken the first steps towards transforming the world’s response to climate breakdown and environmental destruction by making ecocide a punishable criminal offence.Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa have proposed a formal recognition by the court of the crime of ecocide, defined as “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”.
Philippe Sands KC, a prominent international lawyer and professor of law at University College London, acted as a co-chair of the independent expert panel for the legal definition of ecocide, convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation. He told the Guardian he was “100% certain” that ecocide would eventually be recognised by the court.
No countries have been willing to publicly say they oppose the adoption of ecocide as a crime, she said, but she expected resistance and heavy lobbying from high-polluting businesses, including oil companies whose executives could eventually be held liable if the offence were to be adopted. Sands said it was necessary to change the treaty that forms the foundation of the ICC, known as the Rome statute, to recognise ecocide. “You need a change to the statute, that’s fundamental,” he said. “The ICC can’t deal with this in a meaningful sense without that.”
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