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Ecological Murder Could Soon Be Illegal

The European Union is considering a new law that would ban ecocide.

By Anchal Vohra, a columnist at Foreign Policy.

Members of Extinction Rebellion hold a banner reading "Make Ecocide a Crime" in Parliament Square in London.

May 16, 2023, 11:37 AM

Around midnight on May 3, a group of about 30 activists split into several teams and furtively spread out around the European Commission building, with each team carrying a bucket of glue and rolled up posters. Pauline Carbonnelle recounted how her group was chased by two people and evaded possible detention in a police station. “Sometimes people call the police on us,” she told Foreign Policy while relating the events of the night. Nevertheless, 300 of these posters were plastered in the power center in Brussels as the triumvirate of the European Commission, European Council, and European Parliament met to discuss an update to the EU environmental crime directive—an update that included the topic of ecocide.

Carbonnelle and her fellow activists believe defacing walls with posters is a small infraction in the context of the legislation that the posters referenced. The posters depicted scenes of cataclysmic destruction that ranged from images of forest fires to a hapless dead bee. “Forests absorb 30% of all carbon emissions—the food industry sacrifices them for profit,” read one poster, while another said: “Pesticides kill bees—No bees, no food.”

Ecocide simply means the destruction or killing of an ecological system. In 2021, a panel of experts defined it 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.” For the activists, making ecocide a crime would not only mean that European governments would be legally obliged to act more ambitiously to protect the natural environment, but that Big Oil and agribusinesses could soon be legally liable for their alleged driving of climate change.

In March, the legal affairs committee of the European Parliament voted unanimously to recognize ecocide as a crime and caused great excitement among green campaigners. A parliamentarian hailed the decision as historic, and activists described it as a revolutionary step forward. Finally, those who destroy nature at a large scale could be seen as criminals, and the voiceless environment—air, soil, water, flora, and fauna—would have a fighting chance.

“Traditionally, laws have had to rely on there being a damage to people or property,” said Giulio Carini, the communications manager at WeMove Europe, an organization campaigning to make ecocide a crime in Europe. “If we make ecocide a crime, it would mean that a crime could be brought on the behalf of the environment for the harm done to it. Even if there is no harm to human life, we could protect nature through criminal law.”

While the discussions underway in Brussels could take months, or longer, if passed, this reform would not only help Europeans combat destruction of the environment but also pave the path for ecocide to be added to the list of gravest crimes prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The campaign to criminalize ecocide is two-pronged—the first goal is to declare it a crime in the European Union, applicable in the 27-member bloc, and the second is to add it as the fifth crime in the ICC’s Rome Statute, next to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression. The approaches are complementary and have the same goal in mind—saving the environment from owners of big corporations who carry out large-scale environmental destruction without fear of consequences.

French European Parliament member Marie Toussaint, who is leading the EU’s environmental crime directive for the Greens, said that if the EU environmental directive included ecocide, EU member states would be compelled to revise their national laws and thus further encourage its adoption as an international crime at the ICC.

“EU member states represent 40% of the states parties to the International Criminal Court; to register ecocide in their domestic law could therefore have a ratchet effect to condemn this crime at the global level,” Toussaint said.

There are, however, multiple challenges to the proposal, including those from the big businesses it intends to target but also from reluctant leaders. Even among environmentalists and activists, there seem to be disagreements over what the definition of the crime implies, what would qualify as ecocide, and the priority it should be given in a long list of environmental objectives.

The first and most daunting threat comes from the many industry lobbyists in Brussels.

Laura Sullivan, the executive director of WeMove Europe—which also put up posters before the trilogue—said the lobbyists had undue access to policymakers. Sullivan voiced a leading concern among activists that the European Council may “water down” the parliament’s proposal in the name of economic growth and development. She said member states will likely be pressured by big corporations, which may threaten “to pull out of the country” and “take the jobs elsewhere” if ecocide is made a crime, she said. “That is the usual tendency,” Sullivan added, whenever there are attempts to pass a regulation to protect the environment.

Sullivan recounted a meeting with an EU commissioner over the continued export of harmful pesticides banned in Europe to developing countries and remembered her jaw dropping when the commissioner responded with sympathy for the manufacturer instead. “He said, ‘I am sorry the chemical industry is having a very hard time since COVID.’”

There are also internal disagreements among supporters of the ecocide legislation. The definition agreed upon internationally has deliberately been framed as broad-based as possible, but there are murmurs of confusion at the ground level over what it implies. Even the most vocal supporters pushing for its inclusion in the list of crimes under the ICC’s jurisdiction admit it might be diluted as discussions evolve.

One activist who didn’t want to be named focused on “unlawful” to deduce that only illegal acts being committed at a large or widespread scale would be counted as ecocide. Another focused on “wanton” and said even legal acts that destroy an ecological system could be prosecuted. (A lot of legal activity causes major harm to ecological systems, as politicians are often involved in facilitating clearances for big projects.)

Jojo Mehta, the director of the nongovernmental organization Stop Ecocide International, explained that while the law won’t be applicable retroactively, it could impact future acts that would result in ecocide, such as opening of “a new coal mine,” she said.

The website of Stop Ecocide International lists deep sea trawling, oil spills, plastic pollution, deforestation, industrial livestock farming, mineral extraction, mining, and dyeing and tanning in the textile industry as some examples of activities that could lead to environmental destruction and potentially be addressed by an ecocide law.

Frederik Hafen from the European Environmental Bureau, a green pressure group, said a classic example of ecocide is the famous Volkswagen case. In that scandal, the company duped people into thinking they were making environmentally friendly diesel cars when in fact it had installed a software, or “defeat devices,” that gave a false reading of carbon emissions. Hafen said that several years later, some leading corporate figures were being convicted—for committing fraud. “Do we care that someone sold us a car that turned out different from advertised, or do we care that someone sold us a car that destroyed the environment and harmed our lungs?” he asked. If ecocide was criminalized, Volkswagen officials could have possibly been tried for the more heinous crime committed instead.

Others are more circumspect and warn against overuse of the term.

One activist who didn’t want to be named pointed to the European Parliament’s proposal and said that ecocide is way down in the list the priorities, and isn’t legally binding. Too much noise about ecocide unsettles politicians and makes it harder to achieve other objectives, the activist told Foreign Policy at a cafe near the EU Commission. “There is a lot that can be achieved even before ecocide is turned into a crime.”

Ten yards away, at another cafe that advertised itself as a more nature-friendly establishment selling organic food products, Carbonnelle, the environmental activist, fiddled with her coffee cup. She was upset about police cases against her colleagues who had deflated tires of energy-inefficient SUV cars earlier this month and had been called “future militants.” “Sometimes we need to shock a bit to start a debate, to grab attention,” she said, as her earrings, engraved with a flower and a leaf, softly dangled.

Corporate “criminals always find a way to escape [current] laws. We need a global law to be effective, so they can’t escape punishment,” she said.

The European Parliament has proposed a 10-year imprisonment and 10 percent of global profit earned over three years as a fine, but activists hope the stigma of being attached to ecocide—deliberately rooted in the word genocide—will work as a deterrent.

Correction, May 17, 2023: A previous version of this article mistakenly described the dangerous substance that Europe continues to export to developing countries.