Is it time for “ecocide” to become an international crime?

AT THE NUREMBERG trials, which began on November 20th 1945, allied forces prosecuted leading Nazis for atrocities committed during the Holocaust and the second world war. Among the charges against them was something which, just four years earlier, Winston Churchill had called “a crime without a name”: genocide, the deliberate destruction of a group of people. The term, and a convention against it, was then formally adopted by the United Nations. Half a century later it became one of just four crimes punishable by the International Criminal Court (along with crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression). Now, there is a push to name another concept as an international crime—destruction of ecosystems and the environment, also known as “ecocide”.

In November last year a group of international lawyers set about formally defining ecocide. The panel—which is co-chaired by Philippe Sands, a lawyer who has appeared before the ICC and the European Court of Justice and wrote a book about bringing the Nazis to justice, and Dior Fall Sow, a former UN international prosecutor—will publish its draft definition in June. After that, they hope, it will be proposed and eventually adopted as an amendment to the Rome Statute, which governs the work of the ICC. If it is, ecocide will be susceptible to all the frustrations and limitations that plague efforts to halt other international crimes. But it could also mark a turning-point in how the relationship between humans and the natural world is understood.