Lawyers Are Working to Put 'Ecocide' on Par with War Crimes. Could an International Law Hold Major Polluters to Account?


Mélissa Godin TIME
Fri, February 19, 2021

Extinction Rebellion Climate Crime Invesigators

Police watch as Extinction Rebellion "crime scene investigators" in white suits and masks put up climate crime scene tape to investigate areas of ecocide in a performance outside the Brazilian Embassy on Sept. 7, 2020 in London, United Kingdom Credit - Mike Kemp—In Pictures, via Getty Images

When a Nigerian judge ruled in 2005 that Shell’s practice of gas flaring in the Niger Delta was a violation of citizens’ constitutional rights to life and dignity, Nnummo Bassey, a local environmental activist, was thrilled.

Bassey’s organization, Friends of the Earth, had helped communities in the Niger Delta sue Shell for gas flaring, a highly polluting practice that caused mass disruption to communities in the region, polluting water and crops. Researchers had found that those disruptions were associated with increased rates of cancer, blood disorders, skin diseases, acid rain, and birth defects—leading to a life expectancy of 41 in the region, 13 years fewer than the national average.


“For the first time, a court of competence has boldly declared that Shell, Chevron and the other oil corporations have been engaged in illegal activities here for decades,” Bassey said on Nov. 14, 2005, the day the Federal High Court of Nigeria announced the ruling. “We expect this judgement to be respected and that for once the oil corporations will accept the truth and bring their sinful flaring activities to a halt.”

Yet the judgement was not respected. A United Nations report published six years later found that Shell had not followed its own procedures regarding the maintenance of oilfield infrastructure. Today, Shell is still gas flaring in the Niger Delta.

In the 15 years since the ruling, Bassey has come to believe that Shell’s executives might have been held accountable had the case gone to the International Criminal Court (ICC). “Shell could ignore [the case] because it wasn’t in the international media but if it had gone to the ICC, it would have gotten global attention and shareholders would have known what the company was doing,” he says. “If we had had an ecocide law, things would have turned out differently.”

The word “ecocide” is an umbrella term for all forms of environmental destruction from deforestation to greenhouse gas emissions. Since the 1970s, environmental advocates have championed the idea of creating an international ecocide law that would be adjudicated in the ICC and would penalize individuals responsible for environmental destruction. But the effort has gained significant traction over the past year, with leaders from Vanuatu, the Maldives, France, Belgium, the Netherlands—as well as influential global figures like Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg—expressing their support. Although there are questions about whether the ICC as an institution has the teeth to prosecute any crimes, Bassey and other activists believe the law will act as a powerful deterrent against future forms of environmental destruction. “We will not get different outcomes in cases of exploitation and marginalisation unless we reimagine the laws that govern us,” Bassey says.

In December 2020, lawyers from around the world gathered to begin drafting a legal definition of ecocide. If they succeed, it would potentially situate environmental destruction in the same legal category as war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. But even within the movement, questions remain on how far the law should go — and who might fall under its jurisdiction.
The history of the ecocide movement

The term ecocide first rose to the public consciousness in 1972, when Olof Palme, the premier of Sweden, used the term at a United Nations environmental conference in Stockholm to describe the environmental damage caused by the Vietnam War. At the conference, an ecocide convention was proposed but never came to pass.

The idea resurfaced again in the 1990s when the ICC, the world’s first permanent international criminal court, was being created. As a court of last resort, the ICC was established not to override national courts but to complement them, creating a global tribunal that would adjudicate the gravest crimes of concern to the international community. When lawyers came together in 1998 to draft the Rome Statute, the founding document of the ICC, there was a law in the pipeline that would have criminalized environmental destruction.

But the law never came about. “My recollection is that there was just no political support for it,” says Philippe Sands, who was involved in drafting the preamble of the Rome Statute in 1998 (and who would go on to co-chair the expert panel formed in 2020 to draft a legal definition of ecocide). Environmental destruction, Sands says, was not on the public’s consciousness.

This began to change in 2017 when Polly Higgins, a British barrister, launched the Stop Ecocide campaign alongside environmental activist Jojo Mehta. Higgins, who sold her home in 2010 to raise funds to combat environmental destruction, wrote an influential book, Eradicating Ecocide, that informed the legal debate. When the campaign launched a few years later, it quickly gained unprecedented momentum: Greta Thunberg donated €100,000 of the money she received from that year’s Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity to the cause, and for the first time in history, several world leaders publicly backed the idea. Fast-forward three years and now, an expert panel of international criminal lawyers is drafting a definition of ecocide. “Six months ago, we never would have believed where we are at now,” says Mehta. Higgins, sadly, never lived to see her campaign bear fruit, dying in 2019 at the age of 50.

Environmental advocates believe an ecocide law at the ICC would be groundbreaking. While some countries have national laws on environmental harm, there is no international criminal law that explicitly imposes penalties on individuals responsible for environmental destruction. If adopted, experts say there are three main areas where an ecocide law would make a difference.

The first is the symbolic impact of having the ICC elevate environmental destruction to the same level as genocidal crimes. Mehta argues that the fear of being labelled an ecocide criminal could create incentives for leaders to behave more responsibly. “A CEO doesn’t want to be seen in the same bracket as a genocidal maniac,” she says.

The second area where this law could make a difference is by setting a legal precedent, creating a bandwagon effect where international law could prompt changes in national criminal laws, as countries look to signal their environmental commitment to others. ICC laws have influenced national policies before: several countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, have adopted national laws that criminalize ICC crimes.

The third way an ecocide law could be useful is by prosecuting environmental crimes that fall outside of national jurisdictions. This is especially helpful in poorer countries where legal barriers make it difficult to hold foreign companies accountable. An ecocide law, Bassey says, would create an arena in which marginalized communities in countries like Nigeria have a voice against powerful, polluting actors. “Most of this ecocide devastation is happening in communities where voices are not heard,” he says.


A picture taken on March 22, 2013 shows gas flare at Shell 

Cawtharine Channel, Nembe Creek in the Niger DeltaPius 

Utomi Ekpei—AFP via Getty Images

Advocates of an ecocide law also believe it would change the way the environment is valued. “There is something powerfully urgent about the idea that nature has rights,” says Mitch Anderson, founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines, an organization that works with Indigenous communities in the Western Amazon to protect their lands. “The [ecocide] law would ensure that nature has a legal voice.”

There’s still a long way to go, though. While lawyers are expected to finish a draft of the law by the end of spring, it will take at least 3 to 5 years before the law might be ratified. Drafting the law is just the first of many steps: a member state needs to propose it to the ICC, at which point, 50% of ICC states have to approve it. States will then need to convene to debate the exact definition of the law before eventually, adopting and ratifying it.

But if passed, an ecocide law would be unique in the ICC’s history, not only because of what it would protect but who it could go after—the heads of countries and corporations that are big polluters. Historically, the ICC has been criticized for targeting only African dictators while turning a blind eye to Western leaders responsible for mass atrocities. But with an ecocide law, powerful white men—who are often disproportionately represented in extractive industries—could face criminal charges. “The ecocide movement is powerful not only in the legal precedent it could set for protecting rivers, forests, oceans and the air but also in the names and faces it identifies as being behind this destruction,” says Anderson. “[They] may not look like the picture we’re used to seeing.”

Oil and gas companies contacted by TIME did not want to comment on whether they support an ecocide law, but the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) said in a statement they “want to further improve the environmental performance and reduce the likelihood and consequences of incident.”

What counts as ecocide?

Bassey is confident that many of the world’s worst environmental offenses —such as Chevron’s pollution of the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1990s or the ongoing coal-seam fires in Witbank, South Africa—could have been prevented had an ecocide law been in place. “If we had an ecocide law, no one would allow this to go on,” he says. In theory, that might be true. But in practice, much depends on how the term is defined.

Sands, the co-chair of the panel drafting the law, is concerned that the bar for what counts as “ecocide” could be set too high. There’s historical precedence for such a scenario: When the idea of “genocide” was first proposed in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, he envisioned a law that would prosecute individuals that killed members of a national, ethnic, racial, religious or political group. But when member states—many of whom who were worried about their own histories of discrimination—came together to actually draft the law in 1948, they decided that lawyers needed to prove not only that an individual killed members of a group but that they did so with the specific intention to kill.

The result is that most genocide trials heard by the ICC have not ended with a guilty verdict because the burden of proof is too high. Sands is worried the same mistake might be made with the definition of ecocide. “It will never be possible to prove that someone intended to destroy the environment on a massive scale,” he says. “If we set the bar too high, we won’t catch anyone.”

On the other hand, if the bar is set too low—if the ecocide law encompasses too many types of alleged environmentally destructive acts, and implicates too many types of people and institutions—it may lose political support. Many people might get behind an ecocide law that charges mega-corporations for polluting on a grand scale; it is less likely they would support a law that penalizes anyone who destroys the environment in any way. The lawyers drafting the definition didn’t want to offer their opinion on what, specifically, a “low bar” would look like out of concern that doing so would put at risk their ability to advocate for a more robust law.

But even if a robust ecocide law is put in place, the movement faces another big challenge: the limited legal powers of the ICC. On its own, the ICC does not have the authority to enforce laws; it is completely reliant on its member states to arrest and surrender the accused. If a country does not comply—if it does not arrest the accused individual—there is no trial. In addition, over 70 countries are not members—including the United States. Some of the biggest fossil fuel corporations, such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron, are American owned, meaning they would be unlikely to be drawn into a prosecution.

Lawyers working on the ecocide law are acutely aware of these limitations. “Let’s not be starry eyed about our legal international frameworks at the international level,” Sands says. “Let’s be realistic.” Holding perpetrators of environmental destruction to account, he says, must ultimately be done at the national level. Nevertheless, international criminal law can be a tool that catalyzes thinking and helps set a precedent. Although only four people have been convicted at the ICC since it began hearing cases in 2002, the creation of ICC law has influenced national policy through the norms and precedents it helped to generate. Advocates of ecocide believe the law could do something similar.

“We know one law won’t change everything,” says Mehta. “But without something like this in place, it’s hard to see how these [environmental] targets will be met.”

Should Harming Mother Earth Be a Crime? The Case for Ecocide

By Reynard Loki ***

April 26, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Stop Ecocide International logo



The destruction of nature might one day become a criminal offense adjudicated by the International Criminal Court.

On December 3, 2019, the Pacific island state of Vanuatu made an audacious proposal: Make ecocide—the destruction of nature—an international crime. “An amendment of the Rome Statute could criminalize acts that amount to Ecocide,” stated Ambassador of Vanuatu John Licht at the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) annual Assembly of States Parties in the Hague. He was speaking on behalf of his government at the assembly’s full plenary session. “We believe this radical idea merits serious discussion.”

Since then, the idea has become less radical: Amid the intensifying global climate emergency, interest has been mounting among nations and diverse stakeholders—spanning international bodies, grassroots organizations, and businesses—that ecocide be formally recognized as an international crime, joining the ranks of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression, which are the four core international crimes established by the Rome Statute of the ICC. These crimes are not subject to any statute of limitations.

Environmental activists are pushing to elevate the concept of ecocide—literally, the “killing of the ecosystem”—as the fifth international crime to be adjudicated by the ICC. If it becomes a reality, those who commit environmental destruction could be liable to arrest, prosecution, and punishment—by a fine, imprisonment, or both.

The European Union, in February 2024, took a step in the direction of criminalizing cases that lead to environmental destruction and “voted in a new directive” that makes these crimes comparable to ecocide, according to Grist. “The new law holds people liable for environmental destruction if they acted with knowledge of the damage their actions would cause.” The article adds that environmental crime is the “fourth most lucrative illegal activity in the world, worth an estimated $258 billion annually,” according to Interpol, and is only growing with each passing year.

Ecocide proponents want laws being pushed across various international organizations and government agencies to cover the most egregious crimes against nature, which could ultimately include massive abuses to the living environment, such as oil spills, illegal deforestation, deep-sea mining, mountaintop removal mining, Arctic oil exploration and extraction, tar sand extraction, and factory farming. British barrister and environmental lobbyist Polly Higgins defined ecocide as “extensive damage… to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished.”

Ecosystem Services: Existential and Economic Value

Healthy, functioning ecosystems provide a wide range of services to humanity and all life on Earth that are essential for the sustainable management and conservation of natural resources. These services can be categorized into four broad categories.

Provisioning Services: Healthy ecosystems provide food and water for humans and nonhuman animals, timber for building, and fiber for clothing and other industries.

Regulating Services: These services control conditions and processes, such as climate regulation, water purification, and pollination. Wetlands, for instance, purify water by filtering out pollutants, while forests help regulate climate by absorbing carbon dioxide.

Supporting Services: These services are necessary to produce all other ecosystem services. Examples include nutrient cycling, soil formation, and primary production. Soil organisms contribute to nutrient cycling, and the soil supports plant growth.

Cultural Services: Humanity obtains numerous non-material benefits from healthy ecosystems, including spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences. Parks, beaches, and natural landscapes provide opportunities for recreation and relaxation, while cultural heritage sites offer historical and spiritual connections.

Ecosystem services are crucial for human well-being, economic prosperity, and societal development. To ensure that we continue to enjoy these services, we must protect ecosystems from the destructive harm of unsustainable exploitation. Ecocide laws can provide this protection.

War in Ukraine: Ecocide by Russia

Ukraine is seen as a “trailblazer” in pushing for recognizing ecocide crimes “within the realm of justice.” This thinking has especially gained momentum since Russia’s attack on the nation in February 2022, leading to the war on Ukraine being seen as a site of ecocide. On April 16, 2024, environmental, climate, and energy experts gathered at Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest in Middlebury, Vermont, for a panel discussion titled “Criminalizing Ecocide: Lessons From Ukraine in Addressing Global Environmental Challenges.” The event centered on the significant ramifications of Russia’s environmental transgressions in Ukraine within the broader scope of global environmental justice.

The panelists—including Marjukka Porvali from the European Commission (a specialist in environmental policy with a focus on Ukraine); Jojo Mehta, the co-founder of Stop Ecocide; Bart Gruyaert, project director at Neo-Eco Ukraine; and Anna Ackermann, a climate and energy policy analyst—discussed establishing legal precedents to prosecute the gravest offenses against nature, promoting a cultural shift toward taking environmental issues seriously, and navigating a fair transition—while responsibly utilizing critical resources for reconstruction.

The Ukrainian government “has [also] argued for using…[international criminalization of ecocide] as a tool to hold individuals accountable for environmental destruction in wartime.” Their call increased in the summer of 2023 when Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam, which not only killed people but also caused the spread of chemical pollution in the area.

Protecting the Future of Life on Earth

In 2017, Higgins and Mehta founded the Stop Ecocide campaign. Overseen by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, a charitable organization based in the Netherlands, the campaign is the only global effort to exclusively focus on the establishment of ecocide as an international crime to prevent further devastation to the Earth’s ecosystems. “Protecting the future of life on Earth means stopping the mass damage and destruction of ecosystems taking place globally,” states the Stop Ecocide Facebook page. “And right now, in most of the world, no one is held responsible.”

Vanuatu’s bold proposition was the first time a state representative made an official call for the criminalization of ecocide on the international stage since 1972 when then-Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme made the argument during his keynote address at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.

“The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large-scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention,” said Palme in his address. “It is shocking that only preliminary discussions of this matter have been possible so far in the United Nations and at the conferences of the International Committee of the Red Cross, where it has been taken up by my country and others. We fear that the active use of these methods is coupled by a passive resistance to discuss them.”

The Failure of the Paris Climate Agreement

That passive resistance to discussing the immense destruction of nature at the hands of humanity has largely continued. Though nearly 200 nations signed the Paris Agreement in 2015—designed to avoid irreversible climate change by limiting global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius—the countries’ commitments are not nearly enough. As they stand, the promises put the Earth on course to heat up between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius above the historic baseline by 2100.

Although the Paris Agreement mandates the monitoring and reporting of carbon emissions, it lacks the authority to compel any nation to decrease its emissions. Considering this shortcoming, the landmark agreement has been a failure. This failure inspired more than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries to sign a “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” declaration in January 2020. Another 2,100 scientists have signed it as of April 9, 2021.“An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis,” the scientists warned.

Society did not heed the warning: Two years later, in 2022, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels reached a record high.

“A 100 countries say they are aiming for net-zero or carbon neutrality by 2050, yet just 14 have enacted such targets into law,” Carter Dillard, policy director of the nonprofit Fair Start Movement and author of Justice as a Fair Start in Life: Understanding the Right to Have Children, wrote in the Hill in April 2022.

“[T]he Paris Agreement, which itself allowed for widespread ecological destruction, is failing,” said Dillard, whose organization supports the emergence of smaller families not only to tackle environmental degradation but also to establish “fair starts” for the children born today who have to face the prospect of growing up on a rapidly deteriorating planet. “Meanwhile, in real-time, global warming is already killing and sickening people and damaging fetal and infant health worldwide,” Dillard wrote. “Maybe it’s time for a rethink and a deeper approach.”

A Broken Legal Framework

One deeper approach would be to protect the natural environment through the legal system since, as the Paris Agreement has shown, non-binding commitments that are not subject to possible punishment and remain unfulfilled are ultimately meaningless.

Higgins pointed out the illogical state of our current legal system, which shields perpetrators of crimes against nature: “We have laws that are protecting dangerous industrial activities, such as fracking, despite the fact that there is an abundance of evidence that it is hugely harmful in terms of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and the catastrophic trauma it can cause communities that are impacted by it.”

“The rules of our world are laws, and they can be changed,” she said in 2015. “Laws can restrict, or they can enable. What matters is what they serve. Many of the laws in our world serve property—they are based on ownership. But imagine a law that has a higher moral authority… a law that puts people and planet first. Imagine a law that starts from first do no harm, that stops this dangerous game and takes us to a place of safety.”

Ecocide Movement Growing

While the ecocide movement was dealt a blow when Higgins died in 2019 after a battle with cancer, it picked up speed, aided not only by Vanuatu’s proposal but also by high-profile supporters like French President Emmanuel Macron, who said, “The mother of all battles is international: to ensure that this term is enshrined in international law so that leaders… are accountable before the International Criminal Court.”

Environmental protection is becoming more of a concern among the general public, many of whom take a dim view of elected leaders’ inaction. According to a 2024 CBS News poll, 70 percent of Americans favor government action to address climate change. Half of Americans believe that it is a crisis that must be addressed immediately. Almost a quarter of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions come from the industrialized destruction of natural landscapes to support agriculture, forestry, and other uses to support human society. By criminalizing widespread environmental destruction with no remediation, ecocide laws can be a vital tool in dealing with the climate crisis.

A 2024 Conservation in the West poll revealed a deep-seated worry about the environment’s future among two-thirds of voters across eight Western U.S. states. Their concerns ranged from low river water levels and loss of wildlife habitat to air and water pollution. Interestingly, the survey found that 80 percent or more of these voters support the idea of energy companies bearing the costs of cleaning up extraction sites and restoring the land after drilling activities. This view is not far from the belief that environmental destruction should be treated as a criminal offense.

Meanwhile, three-quarters want the U.S. to generate all of its electricity from renewable sources within 15 years, according to a poll conducted by the Guardian and Vice in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. In December 2020, as world leaders marked the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged every country to declare a “climate emergency.”

The general public is warming to the idea of criminalizing the destruction of nature, with more than 99 percent of the French “citizens’ climate assembly”—a group of 150 people randomly selected to help guide the nation’s climate policy—voting to make ecocide a crime in June 2020.

“If something’s a crime, we place it below a moral red line. At the moment, you can still go to the government and get a permit to frack or mine or drill for oil, whereas you can’t just get a permit to kill people because it’s criminal,” said Mehta. “Once you set that parameter in place, you shift the cultural mindset as well as the legal reality.”

“The air we breathe is not the property of any one nation—we share it,” Palme said in his 1972 address. “The big oceans are not divided by national frontiers—they are our common property. … In the field of human environment there is no individual future, neither for humans nor for nations. Our future is common. We must share it together. We must shape it together.”

Greta Thunberg called for a shift in our legal system regarding the environment. “We will not save the world by playing by the rules,” said Thunberg, who has become the face of the international youth climate movement. “We need to change the rules.”

Ecocide Laws Moving Through European Parliaments

In February 2024, the Belgian parliament passed a revised penal code endorsing the punishment of ecocide at national and international levels. This landmark decision makes Belgium the first European nation to acknowledge ecocide within the realm of international law.

“Belgium is now at the forefront of a truly global conversation around criminalizing the most severe harms to nature and must continue to advocate for the recognition of ecocide at the International Criminal Court, alongside genocide,” said Patricia Willocq, director of Stop Ecocide Belgium. “In order to fully protect nature, it is necessary that those that would willfully destroy vast swaths of the natural world, in turn causing untold human harm, should be criminalized.”

Scotland may follow suit. On November 8, 2023, Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament Monica Lennon introduced a proposed ecocide bill in the Scottish Parliament that could lead to substantial penalties for those found guilty of the large-scale destruction of the environment, potentially resulting in up to 20 years of imprisonment. If passed, it would establish Scotland as the first country in the United Kingdom to implement strict consequences for environmental damage.

Lennon initiated a consultation that was set to conclude in February 2024. The government responded by confirming that Circular Economy Minister Lorna Slater would discuss the proposed measures with Lennon. Following the conclusion of the consultation phase on February 9, 2024, the bill now needs the backing of at least 18 parliamentary members to advance to the next stage.

“Thousands of overwhelmingly supportive submissions have been received from members of the public and institutions in the space of just four months and Greens Biodiversity Minister Lorna Slater has now written indicating her government’s support,” reported John Ferguson, political editor of the Sunday Mail, on March 24, 2024.

“This is a promising development and I welcome the Scottish Government’s support,” said Lennon. “Ecocide law is emerging around the world in a bid to prevent and punish the most serious crimes against nature. My proposed bill to stop ecocide in Scotland is gaining widespread support, and this encouraging update from the Scottish Government is a boost to the campaign.”

The Case for Ecocide Laws

If implemented, ecocide laws would protect ecosystems and preserve biodiversity, an essential element for maintaining healthy ecosystems that support all life forms, including humans. These laws would safeguard natural habitats, reduce environmental damage, and significantly mitigate climate change by preserving carbon sinks like forests and curbing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial activities.

Critically, enshrining ecocide as a crime would hold individuals and corporations accountable for environmental harm, promoting a sense of justice and responsibility in interacting with the natural world. Enforcing laws against ecocide also encourages sustainable practices and resource management, fostering a more harmonious relationship between human activities and the environment over the long term.

Together, these reasons reflect broader efforts that stretch across disciplines and activist frontlines—from environmentalism and nature rights to social justice and the law—toward sustainable development, conservation, and responsible stewardship of the planet for current and future generations. Part of that stewardship is eradicating “institutional speciesism,” cultivating ecocentrism, and seeing our place in the natural world in the context of the entire planetary ecosystem—as one species among a multitude of interdependent species.

Philippe Sands, a lawyer who is a member of a panel launched in November 2020 to draft a definition of ecocide and who has appeared before the ICC and the European Court of Justice, told the Economist in 2021, “My sense is that there is a broad recognition that the old anthropocentric assumptions may well have to be cast to one side if justice is truly to be done, and the environment given a fair degree of protection.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

*** REYNARD IS THE NAME GIVEN A FRENCH FOX CHARACTER WHO IS A TRICKSTER

LOKI NORSE GOD OF CHAOS ALSO A TRICKSTER

What is ecocide and could it become an international crime like genocide?

Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa — island nations particularly vulnerable to climate change — asked the International Criminal Court to make the destruction of ecosystems a crime.

By Rachel Pannett
September 10, 2024

Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa have formally asked the International Criminal Court to consider ecocide — acts that destroy the world’s ecosystems — an international crime, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

If successful, their bid could allow for the prosecutions of company leaders, or even nations, that knowingly contribute to environmental degradation. Still, some of the world’s biggest polluters — China, Russia, India and the United States — are not ICC member states and could challenge any of the court’s rulings on jurisdictional grounds.

Proponents say labeling ecocide a crime under international law would create guard rails for the world’s policymakers. “The primary goal is ultimately protective: it’s deterrence,” Jojo Mehta, co-founder of the advocacy group Stop Ecocide International, said in a news release. “Criminal law creates powerful moral as well as legal boundaries, making it clear that extreme levels of harm are not just unlawful but totally unacceptable.”

Here’s what to know about the push to crack down on environmental destruction.

What is ecocide?

Arthur Galston, an American biologist, coined the term in the 1970s. The Yale University professor campaigned to stop the use of the herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam, where it was used to defoliate battlefields. “I thought it was a misuse of science,” he once said of the toxic herbicide, which was developed by other scientists based on his early research into plant growth regulators and has been linked to cancer and birth defects.

In the past few years, international environmental lawyers have been pushing to make ecocide a globally punishable offense. According to the proposal put to the ICC on Monday, ecocide is 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.”

Acts that could count as ecocide, according to legal experts, include oil spills, the deforestation of the Amazon and fossil fuel companies knowingly emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, which scientists have said will probably lead to major and irreversible damage to ecosystems.

“Recognition of ecocide as an international crime would be a major advance in international accountability for severe environmental harm,” Donald R. Rothwell, an expert in international law at the Australian National University, said via email. Still, he noted it “will be a long diplomatic process.”

Where is ecocide illegal?

Ecocide became a crime in Belgium earlier this year. Under the country’s criminal code, it is defined as “deliberately committing an unlawful act causing serious, widespread and long-term damage to the environment, in the knowledge that such acts cause such kind of damage.” The punishment is up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $1.8 million.

The European Union recently criminalized environmental damage “comparable to ecocide.” Similar bills have been introduced in France, the Netherlands and Spain, and are under consideration in Scotland, Brazil and Mexico.

Ecocide is also included in the criminal code in places such as Russia, which has been accused of committing ecocide during the war against Ukraine — underscoring the potential difficulties in enforcing such laws.

Rothwell said there are long-standing international war crimes that relate to environmental damage during armed conflicts.

Writing in the Conversation, Filippos Proedrou, an expert on global political economy at the University of South Wales, and Maria Pournara, a criminology expert at Swansea University, said that the way ecocide is defined in the European Union and elsewhere could undermine the grounds for successful prosecution.

They added that usage of the word “wanton” with regard to acts that damage the environment “sets the bar for prosecution too high,” because defendants could escape prosecution by demonstrating that such acts were outweighed by substantive economic benefits.

Why are Pacific islands battling ecocide?

Low-lying Pacific islands nations are especially vulnerable to rising seas and more intense storms, fueled by climate change. Vanuatu spearheaded the proposal to include ecocide as a crime at the ICC in 2019.

“Environmental and climate loss and damage in Vanuatu is devastating our island economy, submerging our territory, and threatening livelihoods,” Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, said in a news release.

“Legal recognition of severe and widespread environmental harm holds significant potential to ensure justice and, crucially, to deter further destruction,” he added.

Legal experts define a new international crime: 'Ecocide'



Legal experts define a new international crime: 'Ecocide'

Katie Surma, Inside Climate News and Yuliya Talmazan
Tue, June 22, 2021, 

This article was published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news outlet that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is part of "The Fifth Crime," a series on ecocide.

A panel of 12 lawyers from around the world has proposed a legal definition for a new crime that the lawyers want to see outlawed internationally: ecocide, or widespread destruction of the environment.

The definition’s unveiling on Tuesday is the first major step in a global campaign aimed at preventing environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest — and, more broadly, climate change.

The Netherlands-based Stop Ecocide Foundation, along with a coalition of environmentalists, lawyers and human rights advocates, has been pushing since 2017 to make ecocide a crime prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. The court currently prosecutes just four offenses: genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression and war crimes.

If the campaign to criminalize ecocide succeeds, the international court would be able to hold accountable those most responsible for major ecological harms, including business and government leaders.

The definition released on Tuesday, the result of months of work by the team of a dozen lawyers, describes ecocide 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.”

If this definition is adopted as the fifth crime before the international court, it would signal that mass environmental destruction is one of the most morally reprehensible crimes in the world, advocates said.

“None of the existing international criminal laws protect the environment as an end in itself, and that's what the crime of ecocide does,” Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London and co-chair of the panel that drafted the definition, said at an online news conference Tuesday.

The International Criminal Court has not commented on the panel’s efforts.

There is still a long road ahead before the ecocide definition could be adopted by the court. One of the court’s 123 member countries would need to submit the definition to the United Nations secretary-general, triggering a formal multistep process that could lead to an amendment of the Rome Statute, which sets the court’s rules.

But legal scholars say the panel’s work could still have effects at the International Criminal Court and beyond, regardless of whether ecocide is officially made an international crime.

“It is an essential exercise because environmental damage is growing phenomenally,” said David J. Scheffer, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues who led the U.S. delegation that negotiated the International Criminal Court’s founding treaty. “Ecocide, by its mere existence, will heighten the issue of the environment.”
The campaign

The International Criminal Court’s four existing crimes focus on harm to humans, not the planet — so the lawyers who began working late last year to craft an ecocide definition had to largely start from scratch.

They wanted it to be strict enough to be meaningful, but they also wanted it to be appealing enough to win support from most of the world’s nations, which are historically reluctant to cede sovereignty to international institutions.

“A perfect definition does you no good if states ignore it or worse, become hostile to the enterprise and set the effort back,” said Nancy Combs, an expert in international criminal law and professor at William and Mary Law School. “If the panel’s calculations are wrong, the whole thing could go bust.”

Related: A growing number of world leaders advocate making ecocide a crime before the International Criminal Court, to serve as a “moral line” for the planet.

The definition aims to be less of a sledgehammer and more of a guardrail for governments and businesses that are most responsible for ecological harm.

“We hope that that approach comes up with something which is potentially effective,” Sands said, but not “so widespread in its effects that states run away and throw their arms up in horror.”

The definition also had to be general enough to address all manner of environmental harms and keep pace with evolving science but specific enough to put would-be wrongdoers on notice of what counts as criminal behavior.

The six-month endeavor required an unprecedented collaborative effort between international criminal lawyers and environmental lawyers, two professions that until now have rarely intersected.
The definition

The 165-word definition resembles the court’s other four crimes in some ways, including by implementing high thresholds, like “widespread” and “severe” damage.

But the new potential crime differs in one major respect: harm to human beings is not a prerequisite for ecocide. That shift would be a major development for international criminal law, which mainly focuses on human injuries, Richard Rogers, a British lawyer and one of the panelists, said.

The definition is also notable for what it doesn’t include. The panel chose not to incorporate a list of examples of ecocide for fear that something would inevitably be left out, possibly signaling that the excluded act may not qualify, lawyers said.

That choice also had a political dimension. The panel did not want countries to feel they were being targeted by examples. “We felt that it was best to keep that door shut,” Sands said.

Sands believes the definition would cover actions that contribute to climate change, though the specifics aren’t yet clear. It may come down to whether the actions are also unlawful, under other national or international laws, he said.
What’s next

Now that the panel has delivered its definition, Stop Ecocide’s diplomatic work will kick into high gear to marshal political backing.

The support, or lack thereof, will act as a bellwether for how serious governments are about combating climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.

Lawmakers from close U.S. allies like France, Belgium, Finland, Spain, Canada, Luxemburg and the European Union have voiced their support for making ecocide a crime. Major greenhouse gas emitters like the United States, China, India and Russia are not members of the court but could weigh in on diplomatic negotiations.

If one of the court’s member countries formally proposes an ecocide crime, triggering the start of the amendment process, then at the court’s next annual meeting in December, the countries would hold a vote on whether to take up the proposal. Then, the countries would debate the crime’s definition, a process that could take years, or even decades.

In the meantime, Jojo Mehta, the co-founder of Stop Ecocide Foundation, expects just the prospect of the crime to shift the behavior of some businesses, governments, insurers and financers.

And lawmakers from around the world have already expressed interest in enacting their own national ecocide laws, using the panel’s definition as a starting point.

“Even if some states only revise their domestic law, that would be a success,” Christina Voigt, a Norway-based international law professor and one of the panelists, said.

Above all, the new definition is stimulating debate about whether mass environmental damage should be illegal.

“We fully expect that attention from around the world will expand significantly as a result of this definition emerging,” Mehta said, “and that public interest and demand for this very concrete legal solution will steadily increase.”

What it means if 'ecocide' becomes an international crime

BY JOJO MEHTA, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 07/10/21 

© Getty Images

Ecocide means to destroy the environment, but when considered etymologically, from the Greek and Latin, it signifies to kill one’s home.

When we were first able to view, and photograph, the Earth from space, our planetary perspective changed. Suddenly “home” had a whole new meaning. Nowhere, as far as our technology has been able to discern, is there evidence of any planet like Earth — anywhere else that can sustain life as we know it.

In its recent 11,700-year period of climatic stability, that is what our planetary home has done, facilitating the spread and technological advance of human civilization. While benefiting many in terms of material comfort, life expectancy and societal support structures, this advance has increasingly taken place within a framework of thought that perceives nature as “other” — a resource to be exploited, or a foe to be conquered. The Oxford English Dictionary even defines nature as “opposed to humans.”

With this perspective, ever since the industrial revolution, we have been — at first unwittingly, now recklessly and even knowingly — disrupting the biological, chemical and atmospheric systems on whose stable interaction we intimately and profoundly depend. Greenhouse gas emissions are just one part of this story. Bit by bit, with each felled forest, polluted river system, species extinction, oil spill, toxic waste leak, nuclear or mining disaster, we are committing ecocide. Relentlessly, and with startling rapidity, we are killing our home — while exacerbating social injustice, racial inequality and resource conflict along the way.

And because our legal system doesn’t treat environmental destruction with the seriousness we are now beginning to understand it warrants, we are doing this with impunity.

The word “ecocide” was first used on the international stage by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme at the UN environment conference in Stockholm (1972), when he stated that “destruction brought about... by large scale use of bulldozers and pesticides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention.”

Nearly 50 years later, the world is at last beginning to pay that attention. Last month an expert panel of top international criminal and environmental lawyers, convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, proposed a legal definition of the term, suitable for adoption into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a fifth crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Responding to the explicit call of climate-vulnerable island nations Vanuatu and the Maldives, directly impacted by rising sea levels and heavy tropical storms, such a move would criminalize, “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.”

The warmth of response to this legal definition has been remarkable. Sparking articles in over 100 global publications in the first week, from the Financial Times to Der Spiegel and from Bloomberg to Le Monde, it has also prompted political action. From Bangladesh to the Caribbean to the UK (where an amendment to the government’s Environment Bill includes the newly released definition in full), diplomats and politicians are joining a conversation which already includes EU states such as France and Belgium and has the support of public figures as influential and diverse as Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg.

Since the International Criminal Court’s mandate is the prosecution of individuals, the addition of ecocide to the list of crimes considered “of most serious concern to the international community as a whole” would make key corporate and political actors personally liable to criminal prosecution in any ratifying state, should their decisions threaten severe and either widespread or long-term environmental damage — thus creating an enforceable deterrent to help prevent finance from flowing to projects that could destroy ecosystems. Nothing concentrates the mind like having one’s personal freedom on the line.

Moreover, ecocide law may prove to be not just a stick but also a carrot. Setting a criminal parameter will not only steer activity away from hazards — acting as a kind of health and safety law for the planet – but is likely to stimulate innovation and development in a healthy direction in a wide range of economic sectors. Many of the solutions we need to transition to sustainability are already available — renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, circular economy — but aren’t being supported or developed at scale while finance continues to flow towards the same old destructive approaches, leaving those who would do the right thing at a disadvantage.

Criminalizing ecosystem destruction at the highest level could also shore up and strengthen the whole edifice of environmental law, supporting all those working to improve regulation and best practice, from frontline activists to academics, scientists, NGOs and policymakers.

While it would be naive to believe that establishing this crime would be a silver bullet for all of our environmental woes, or even prevent all ecocides, it is difficult to see how our planet’s life-support systems can be adequately protected — or indeed Paris targets and UN Sustainable Development Goals realistically approached — without a “hard stop” intervention of this kind. This year’s NDC synthesis report from the UNFCCC certainly suggests that we’re not doing well without it. Goodwill agreements and raised ambitions are clearly not up to the task.

But perhaps the most powerful effect of defining and criminalizing ecocide as an international crime may be that of beginning to shift cultural and moral assumptions. Our understanding of our place in, and responsibility towards, the natural world is in dire need of a reality check. Calling out and condemning ecocide for what it is may be exactly what is required if we are to begin to transform our relationship with the Earth from one of harm to one of harmony. That may be the best way to ensure our children, and our children’s children, will still be able to call this beautiful planet “home.”

Jojo Mehta is co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International and chair of the charitable Stop Ecocide Foundation. She co-founded the public campaign in 2017 (alongside legal pioneer the late Polly Higgins) to support making severe harm to nature an international crime and has overseen the growth of the global movement while coordinating legal developments, diplomatic traction and public narrative.

West Papua’s Green State Vision: Social Movement, Therefore “Terrorism”

by Raki Ap – Julie Wark

August 28, 2024
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Arfak Mountains, the highest point in West Papua. Photograph Source: David Worabay – CC BY-SA 3.0

Apart from the brutality it undergirds, almost always fuelling violence, there’s something truly unhinged about political disinformation, especially in Indonesian-occupied West Papua because it’s so at odds with reality, not to say bizarre. Yet it’s orchestrated at the highest levels of government in Indonesia and readily accepted by powerful governments and transnationals, which have their own systems of disinformation, including peddling Indonesia’s, and lying by commission and omission as a standard activity to advance geostrategic and economic objectives.

In West Papua, disinformation buttresses Indonesia’s hands-on, six-decade, genocidal and ecocidal project. At the global level—where official and corporate-funded lying about the climate catastrophe (which, as anyone can see and feel, is upon us), criminalization of protestors, and harassment and abuse of climate scientists are standard—West Papua is an important part of the story as home to one of the world’s largest rainforests, a crucial factor in any attempt to limit the generalized effects of the disaster. But Indigenous people everywhere who are trying to save their rainforest habitats, who know how to protect them, are being displaced, attacked, and killed. In West Papua, the struggle isn’t about isolated tribes trying to protect their bit of turf, but a nationwide social movement with a comprehensive political platform, the Green State Vision. Since this is diametrically opposed to Indonesia’s brutal policy of what Sartre called “the systematic exploitation of man’s humanity for the destruction of the human”, in which no autochthonous life, vegetable, animal, or human is sacred, it’s labeled “terrorist”. The name-calling, whereby all West Papuans are terrorists (just as all Palestinians threaten the genocidal state of Israel), is no idle trash-talk but structural racism, requiring wholesale destruction of living obstacles to Indonesia’s “development”.

In April 2021, the Coordinating Minister of Politics, Law, and Security of the Indonesian government officially designated the TNPPB-OPM (National West Papua Freedom Army – Free Papua Movement) a terrorist group, an “Armed Secessionist Criminal Group”, “Security Intruder Movement”, and “Armed Criminal Group”. Indonesia, a member of the UN Human Rights Council, may have been given a nimbus of dubious respectability to make such charges (the righteous state embraced by the international “community”, beset by savage terrorists) but the perpetrator of terrorism is Indonesia itself, with its torture mode of governance, if this definition of “terrorism” is applied to its military occupation of West Papua: “Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-)clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons… [The] direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population and serve as message generators.”

The TNPPB-OPM is “terrorist” because it’s tenaciously trying to make known and prevent the ravages of such cataclysmic projects as the 4,300-km Trans-Papua highway and connecting roads, carving up the rainforest to enable extractive projects; palm oil plantations and food estates (just one of which takes an 2.7 million hectares of forest and peat areas, devastating some 200 villages); military-linked gold mining, for example in the Intan Jaya regency; huge mining projects like the Freeport Grasberg mine and BP’s Bintuni gas project, safeguarded under the heading of “vital national projects”; and many smaller projects, also protected by violent “security” forces. All those affected are victims of what’s called “counterterrorism”.

The Green State Vision is particularly threatening, as its reach goes far beyond local or identity politics. It’s of global relevance, universal in spirit, and a blueprint for other social movements around the world which are struggling against the forces that are destroying the possibilities for human life, and most other kinds of life, on planet Earth. It’s the political platform of a well-organized social movement, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua(ULMWP) which brings together “all West Papuans, both inside and outside West Papua”.

A social movement is “an organized effort by a group of human beings to effect change in the face of resistance by other human beings”, to cite anthropologist David Aberle who, in The Peyote Religion Among the Navajo (1966), identifies four different kinds: alterative (seeking partial change through individual behavior, as in recycling); redemptive (often religious movements promising salvation through total personal transformation); reformative (aiming at partial social change, through women’s voting rights, for example); and transformative (seeking to abolish the prevailing system). In this framework, the Green State Vision offered by the ULMWP would be “redemptive” and “transformative”. Although it isn’t religious by nature, it does require an ethical, redemptive understanding of life and the place of humans on Earth, which would fit with transformative goals of leaving the neoliberal system to which the planet is currently subjected. Unlike social movements that seek an improved status quo, the Green State Vision is, by definition, anti-neoliberal, and anti-system. It also differs from most social movements in scope since it’s tackling ecocide and, understanding the interconnectedness of all forms of life on Earth is, therefore, seeking results on a global scale.

Ecocide

Ecocide affects, to a greater or lesser—and certainly worsening—extent, all human and non-human life. It is a crime of global extractivist politics, escalating from early industrialization, through colonialism, to neoliberalism. Since it is worldwide in reach, combatting it requires a solution of the same magnitude. In terms of social justice, the principle that promotes the “happiness of the whole of the community”, as the nineteenth-century Irish philosopher William Thompson put it, the only doctrine covering all humans is universal human rights, because human is a universal category. However, as scientists are learning more and more about interdependence in what evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis called the “symbiotic planet”, it’s also now obvious that the “community” must include all life forms.

In its dictionary definition, ecocide seems straightforward: “the destruction of large areas of the natural environment as a consequence of human activity”. But not the activity of all humans. It’s a direct and indirect crime of a minority of humans against the majority, extending beyond human victims to all living things and the elements that sustain them (soil, rocks, air, vegetation, oceans, landforms, mountains, hills, valleys, mounds, berms, deserts, watercourses, water bodies, springs, wetlands, forests, jungles, and so on). “Eco”, from the Greek oikos, contains the idea of place and, in particular, home or household, while “-cide” is from the Latin caedere (to demolish or kill). Ecocide has consequences for all living and non-living beings and their home, this now-endangered planet. It’s more destructive than genocide, which is confined to certain human groups, global in spread and globalizing in consequences. Piecemeal measures against ecocide will never suffice.

States, which control economic, political, social, and ideological approaches to ecocide (and increasingly often severely punishing demonstrators against its causes like fossil fuel dependence), protect the interests of their powerholders. This entails covering up the fact that ecocide produces, “great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health”, which is listed as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court. More than five hundred years ago, colonialism established states built on plunder, whose “legitimacy”, backed by property laws and governmental institutions (and, more recently, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and “development” banks), depends on the profits of despoiling “underdeveloped” lands to fund lavish trappings of power and provide “developed” populations with large infrastructure projects presented as an alluring dream of modernity. Subduing the earth means much more than grabbing certain resources here and there. It’s a whole economic system of marauding and dispossession, an ideology profoundly affecting social and human/nature relations. Plunder occurs in “enclaves”, but the benefits go international. The misery caused is extensive and the profits are highly concentrated.

Ecocide is related with genocide but differs in magnitude and political consequences. Indigenous peoples have long been decimated by genocide perpetrated by colonial and postcolonial governments, and national and multinational corporations, but it’s often swept under the diplomatic rug of “national sovereignty”, a political stance of non-interference. Unspoken racism underlies indifference to genocide because it’s not occurring in the West. However, ecocide does affect the West, and does affect planet Earth as a whole, as the present climate crisis is showing. Stop Ecocide International is seeking to introduce ecocide as a fifth international crime (after genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression) into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It defines ecocide 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”. Inclusion of the crime of ecocide into the Rome Statute could contribute to a global “change of consciousness” as well as offering a more effective legal framework for safeguarding the future of planet Earth.

Understanding “ecocide” means questioning Western notions of separate species and human exceptionalism. Taxonomising nature into species, as if making an inventory of human possessions, gives a false idea of independent existences. As Lynn Margulis famously pointed out, symbiosis constantly brings together different life forms in such a way that “individuals” generate new symbiotic forms at growing and evermore inclusive levels of integration. All life depends on the microbial world, the “source and well-spring of soil and air”. There’s still much to be learned about the interrelationships of the different parts of nature in fast-changing environments where large groups of lifeforms are becoming extinct. The present climate catastrophe constitutes a global laboratory scarily demonstrating the truth of Margulis’s theory of the deep interdependence of species. However, Margulis wasn’t the first person to understand this for it’s a core notion of Indigenous cosmologies.

West Papua and the Global Order

Indigenous habitat defenders have cosmologies that couldn’t be less extractivist, less capitalist. This is expressed in language too, for example in circular concepts of time entailing care and responsibility rather than the deadly “arrow” that “progresses” into a future by ripping up a past and present; or, often with few numbers, emphasizing quality over quantity (and the ultimate perversion of algorithms that control human existence). If Indigenous peoples have always understood their natural habitat as a world, a cosmos, a well-ordered whole, they also know that damaging an environment, a sea, a lake, a forest, a savanna, a desert, means damaging the world, perhaps beyond repair. Benny Wenda, Interim President of the ULMWP Provisional Government, expresses it thus: “If you want to save the world, you must save West Papua”.

One of Earth’s most betrayed and castigated countries, West Papua, the western half of the Melanesian island of New Guinea, shares a colonially imposed border (slashed through the center of the island, dividing tribes and lands), with independent Papua New Guinea. With a mountainous interior, forest lowlands, large mangrove swamps, as well as many small islands and coral reefs, West Papua has some 230 tribes, with unique cultures and languages. They are the rainforest’s stewards, observing ancient, small-scale agricultural practices of cultivating yams, sweet potatoes, and pigs in the highlands, or a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with a diet largely based on sago and fish in the lowlands. West Papua’s biodiverse forests cover about 34.6 million hectares, of which more than 27.6 million have been designated as “production” (read: for plundering) forest. The plunderers are the Indonesian military and their transnational corporate partners.

Indonesia’s settler colonial project in West Papua is built on structural racism. Like the forest, the people protecting the land must be chopped down and cleared away. They’re an obstacle to “progress”. Since 1963, when it invaded West Papua, it has carried out a huge social engineering (transmigration or Indonesianisation) project, bringing well over a million (the number is a state secret) poverty-stricken people from several islands to live in camps cut into the rainforest. It seems that Indonesians now outnumber West Papuans. Then there are direct, murderous attacks on West Papuan villages. As Benny Wenda describes it, “Indonesia tried to build development on the bones of our people. The international community must stop the genocide and ecocide of my people in order to protect planet earth”. He also observes that the politics of social justice doesn’t come in separate boxes where you tick one (like save the trees) but forget the rest (like all the forest’s living beings, like universal human rights).

Protection of rainforests can’t happen without recognition that the peoples who live in them are agents with a leading role as their custodians. Their voices must be heard, not only when bearing witness to the crimes committed against them but also when sharing their knowledge of cohabitation in and with nature, which is now so essential for the planet’s survival (at least as a human habitat). Yet, when the West Papuan leaders presented the Green State Vision at COP26 in Glasgow it was largely ignored, then and since.

One of the reasons why this valuable, constructive document presented by rainforest caretakers was not gratefully welcomed and widely circulated is that, in geopolitical terms, it would mean condemning six decades of genocide in West Papua. Not only Indonesia is responsible. Genocide is also the result of a sham UN-supervised referendum in 1969, after which the General Assembly formally “took note” that it did not represent the will of the people, but went ahead anyway to recognise Indonesian sovereignty, and then to help cover up the killing of up to (or more than) ten percent of the population. Indonesia’s allies, including the United States, European countries, and Australia (and if you want an idea of how complicit Australia is, watch this documentary on its 1975 oil-and-gas-motivated coverup of Indonesia’s murder of five of its journalists in Balibo, East Timor), are “strategically aligned” accomplices. Why? Because, to give one geopolitical reason, Indonesia crucially occupies a position at the intersection of the Pacific Ocean, the Malacca Straits, and the Indian Ocean. More than half the world’s shipping passes through Indonesian waters, including US nuclear attack submarines going to taunt China with their might.

To sum up, the Green State Vision challenges the imperially based Westphalian system in embracing the idea of Indigenous systems that recognise interdependence between political actors and the land itself. Any state-level support for the West Papuan project would entail enraging the Indonesian regime and its big western backers. There is much talk of a global system which, logically, should include everyone, but the words usually refer to the G8, or maybe the G20. They tend not to include ordinary, and especially Indigenous people. Rainforests and all their species won’t be protected if the human rights of their Indigenous inhabitants—5% of the world’s population caring for 85% of its biodiversity—aren’t included and recognised as leaders in the project of saving rainforests. Their human rights are crucial for those of everyone else.

The Green State Vision: Education and Politics

If West Papuan resistance is ever discussed, the OPM (Free Papua Movement) tends to be mentioned, often demeaned as primitive and exotic. Consisting of various groups armed with bows and arrows, machetes, axes, and some rifles and revolvers, it has existed since the 1960s. The political and diplomatic wings of the struggle are usually ignored in the mainstream press. They’re essential because they’ve achieved a nation-wide social movement, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (UMLWP) with a political programme, the Green State Vision. Focused on protecting the West Papuan rainforest, this represents what the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide calls a change of consciousness. Drafted with the help of international lawyers, it’s a quintessentially West Papuan document but of global significance. It’s an ethical statement of intention, spelling out how “to restore, promote and maintain balance and harmony, amongst human and non-human beings, based on reciprocity and respect toward all beings”. Understanding that social justice fosters the “happiness of the whole of the community”, the West Papuan people have organised a government-in-waiting and, not only that, but an official plan for “Making Peace with Nature in the 21st century”.

The Green State Vision is conceptually inseparable from the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) which was formalised when leaders from different factions of the independence movement met in Vanuatu in December 2014 to unite the three main political organisations that have long struggled for independence: Federal Republic of West Papua (NRFPB), National Coalition for Liberation (WPNCL), and West Papua National Parliament (PNWP). This initiative meant recognition of one of the strengths of the overall struggle for independence. The fact that there are so many tribes with their own languages and boundaries may, for a westerner, look like fragmentation. However, this is a system of tribal democracy, of centuries-old rules and agreements with neighbouring tribes that has worked for some 50,000 years. People, identifying with their tribes and as West Papuans, have always understood the checks and balances of the system, and the ULMWP plans to conserve them in a nation-wide federal structure.

The Green State aims to provide free education and healthcare to citizens and residents. However, “redemptive” and “transformative” education is happening now, as an ongoing part of the struggle. Keeping traditional values alive, passing down languages and customs means rejecting the system that’s trying to kill them. Education for a future Green Vision happens in daily life through resistance, maintaining the ethos of learning from nature, reinforcing the community, understanding that women—providers of food and educators at village level—are an essential part of the struggle, eschewing individualist consumerism, accepting the responsibilities of customary guardianship, grassroots diplomacy (between tribes), and democratic governance. Since 1963, the political struggle has been the harsh classroom of survival, and the West Papuan people and their leaders have learned not only that their age-old customs are the strongest defence of their national identity but also, as the climate catastrophe wreaks its terrible damage everywhere, that the principles they foster among their own people have worldwide relevance.

The Green State Vision commits, inter alia, to the following:

+ Restoring and promoting harmony, reciprocity, and respect among human and non-human beings, with people accepting responsibility as protectors and carers.

+ Attending to the needs of society and the environment rather than GDP.

+ Acting globally and locally to combat and mitigate the climate emergency, making ecocide a serious criminal offence, and supporting its inclusion as a crime in the International Criminal Court.

+ Serving notice on oil, gas, mining, logging, and palm oil corporations that they must respect international best practices in environmental protection.

+ Providing free education and healthcare to citizens and residents, with robust social policies in general.

+ Restoring guardianship of lands, forests, rivers, and other waters to customary authorities, together with decision-making powers on their occupation and use; providing state support with appropriate laws, policies, technical assistance, funds, and enforcement; and guaranteeing that a substantial and fair proportion of the benefits flow to the local community.

+ Establishing institutional and legal safeguards to ensure that customary powers are not abused, and that the environment is at all times safeguarded in accordance with international standards.

+ Adopting and adapting the best features of the modern democratic state including a representative legislature, an accountable executive government, an independent, impartial judiciary, and other independent institutions and mechanisms to prevent corruption and abuse or misuse of power at all levels (national, regional, and customary); ensuring effective protection of human rights; consulting stakeholders before and while making laws and policies that affect their rights and interests; and cooperating with other states in combatting the climate emergency, pursuing international criminal justice, and other key aspects of global co-operation.

+ Ensuring that the coercive arms of the state do not abuse or misuse their power.

Indigenous Knowledge

One huge stumbling block to westerners’ understanding of how Indigenous people experience their rainforest habitats, source of their sustenance is that, in the West, food is divorced from social life. Sanitised, plastic-wrapped, genetically manipulated, it is flown and trucked in from around the globe to be sold in supermarkets where the cashier barely has time to look up and say hello, and often consumed alone. By contrast, rainforest communities are organized around fishing, hunting, gathering, and planting as social and cultural activities. Their environment is essential for their health, so they love, understand, and care for it. This cosmos is an inseparable part of human nature, language, and culture. Indigenous peoples belong to and are not owners of their environment. Of course, Indigenous knowledge isn’t homogenous. In the world’s different habitats, people interact with their environment in historically diverse ways, which means that general, quick-fix solutions must be avoided, and proper attention given to particular ecosystems which, in turn, will benefit biodiversity in general. Nevertheless, with its solid principles, the Green State Vision can serve internationally as a foundational document for rainforest defenders, for tackling ecocide, as well as setting an example of good political and philosophical practice for Western social movements.

The climate crisis began long ago. For capitalism to exist, beliefs linking people to animals, soil, sun, stars, moon, seas, rivers, and rocks had to be destroyed. It also required a separation of humans and the animals they exploit. Today, contempt for animals and their habitat is at the core of the global system that has caused the climate crisis. In their sterile, high-rise (severed from the earth), air-conditioned offices with fake exotic plants, the people who are making decisions about the fate of the planet are also the most alienated from nature. We need to stop the real perpetrators of terror who are destroying conditions of life everywhere. We need a new system that respects nature, respects human rights, and the West Papuan people are offering an exemplary proposal of a redemptive, transformative social movement that is trying to “effect change”. Vital change.

Raki Ap is spokesperson for the Free West Papua Campaign.

Julie Wark is a translator, CounterPunch columnist and co-author of Against Charity.