Criminalising Ecocide at the International Criminal Court

Throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries, untenable economic development and excessive depletion
of environmental resources have devastated the relationship that humans share with the natural world. As
knowledge and concern regarding environmental destruction has become ever more widespread, the
criminalisation of ‘ecocide’ has increasingly been debated by academics, activists, politicians and legal
professionals. In 2020, the ‘Stop Ecocide’ campaign convened a panel of experts, tasked with drafting a definition
of ecocide capable of being incorporated into the International Criminal Court’s mandate. In this briefing, we
explore 1) the history of ecocide as a proposed international crime; 2) the current gap in accountability for crimes
against the environment; 3) the potential benefits of ecocide’s criminalisation; and 4) the prospects for a future
crime of ecocide.