![]() ![]() That is important practically and legally but also symbolically, Mehta said. ![]() “What ecocide aims at is naming and criminalizing the worst harms to nature,” she told CNN. Mehta, whose charitable foundation commissioned the independent expert panel, said the idea of legislation wasn’t to prosecute every little environmental harm. While the crimes the ICC prosecutes focus directly on the protection of the human, “the gap is the crime to the environment,” he said. “The law can make a difference by changing consciousness,” he told CNN. Philippe Sands, a lawyer with more than 30 years of experience in international law, was part of the panel. The Deep-Water Horizon oil spill, severe pollution in the Niger Delta and Amazon deforestation, could be examples of ecocide, said Jojo Mehta, co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International.įlooding turns Odesa's coastline into "garbage dump and animal cemetery" after dam collapse Until now, international criminal law has focused mainly on crimes committed directly against people, but experts say there has been a gap when it comes to legislation that would target the gravest harms to the environment. “There has been pressure building up around this issue,” Weir said. ![]() The push to make ecocide an international crime has been bubbling for decades, but the past 10 years or so have seen a renewed fight, spearheaded by the British lawyer Polly Higgins, who died in 2019. “This moment, the destruction of the dam, how visible this has been, is perhaps one of those paradigm moments when we do actually see a shift,” said Doug Weir from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK-based charity. It may take years to fully understand the full scope of the damage caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam but some legal and environmental experts believe the unfolding ecological catastrophe will be a turning point for the recognition of ecocide. The term “ecocide” may be an unfamiliar one to many, but there has been a long-running fight to get large-scale environmental destruction recognized as an international crime, prosecutable at the International Criminal Court (ICC).Īs the world continues to witness ecological disasters that span national borders, criminal accountability is rare, due in part to a lack of proper legislation and investigative process, experts say. Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, left, and other prominent international and Ukrainian figures attend a press briefing in Kyiv on June 29, 2023. ![]() The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, on a visit to Kyiv on Thursday, told reporters that “ecocide and environmental destruction is a form of warfare as Ukrainians by this point know all too well, and so does Russia.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the collapse as “an environmental bomb of mass destruction.” High profile figures outside the country have agreed. The causes of the collapse have yet to be established – whether it was targeted as part of Russia’s war in Ukraine, or whether it was a structural failure – but what is certain is that it is one of the biggest ecological disasters Europe has seen in the last few decades. It wiped out villages, flooded farmland and nature reserves, and swept up pollutants like oil and agricultural chemicals as it made its destructive path towards the Black Sea. The collapse of the Kakhovka dam in the south of the country sent water thundering downstream, killing more than 100 people according to Ukrainian officials. On June 6, Ukraine suffered an environmental catastrophe. ![]()
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