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<\/p>\nIllegal logging that decimates virgin Romanian forest. Oil spills that blacken the Galician coast. Chemical dumping in the Rhine.<\/p>\n
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The European Union, although highly urbanized and a world leader in many facets of environmental protection, has not been immune to the kind of large-scale ecological devastation more commonly associated with the Americas or Africa. Now the continent\u2019s politicians are attempting to crack down, with a new law that aims to tackle its most serious environmental crimes and is expected to be finalized by the European Parliament very soon.<\/p>\n
Advocates are hailing the legislation as a landmark moment for global environmentalism, and especially the Stop Ecocide<\/em> movement, which seeks to move legal enforcement of the most serious environmental crimes from the civil into the criminal arena \u2013 and thus reframe egregious destruction of nature as more akin to crimes against people.<\/p>\n \u201cThis text marks the end of impunity for environmental criminals<\/em>,\u201d Marie Toussaint, a French member of the European Parliament who played a central role in the negotiations, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. \u201cWith this agreement<\/em>,\u201d Toussaint added in a statement, \u201cthe European Union adopts some of the most ambitious legislation in the world<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The directive designates new sanctions and penalties for several high-level crimes, such as shipping pollution, importing invasive species and the use of mercury and the most dangerous greenhouse gasses. Perpetrators could receive up to 10 years of prison time in some instances.<\/p>\n It also criminalizes major environmental offenses that are \u201ccomparable to ecocide<\/em>,\u201d effectively making the legislation the most significant achievement yet in the growing movement.<\/p>\n \u201cWe absolutely raised a glass<\/em>,\u201d Jojo Mehta, a noted environmentalist and the cofounder of the United Kingdom-based group Stop Ecocide International, says of the moment in November when the European Parliament, following months of negotiations, agreed to enshrine the law. \u201cThat\u2019s our biggest win so far, definitely. It\u2019s massive<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Ecocide is not a new concept. The term was coined in 1970 by Arthur Galston, an American bioethicist who first used the word to describe the environmental damage wrought by the U.S. government\u2019s widespread deployment of Agent Orange<\/em> in Vietnam. When Galston introduced the concept, he also proposed a plan to ban it; two years later the Swedish prime minister reiterated the idea. But for decades progress was limited, even as incidents of large-scale, human-caused environmental destruction \u2013 deforestation of the Amazon, plastic dumping in the Pacific Ocean, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and Niger Delta, for example \u2013 continued around the world.<\/p>\n More recently the movement has found new life, after Mehta and another cofounder, the late Scottish environmentalist Polly Higgins, started Stop Ecocide International in 2017.<\/p>\n The group\u2019s long-standing objective has been to add ecocide as a fifth crime \u2013 joining genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression \u2013 in the Rome Statute<\/em>, the 1998 treaty that established the International Criminal Court, or ICC.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a lofty goal that supporters argue would dramatically elevate global environmental efforts and largely work through deterrence, because serious ecological offenders would know they\u2019re potentially subject to prosecution in the same way the ICC prosecutes some of the world\u2019s most notorious war criminals and dictators. (Some of the Netherlands-based ICC\u2019s indictments of the past several years have targeted people such as Noureddine Adam, a Central African Republic rebel leader; Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a Libyan commander who was later assassinated; and Russian President Vladimir Putin.)<\/p>\n Even the existence of such a law would produce a major global recalibration, advocates argue, pushing major polluters such as energy and mining companies to tread more carefully and encouraging governments and the public to prioritize environmental protection.<\/p>\n The Rome Statute<\/em> addition would also require the support of two-thirds of the court\u2019s 123 member states, and to date no member states have submitted a proposal, the necessary step before a vote. But momentum has been building.<\/p>\n \u201cThe progress of this has gone faster and better than we anticipated<\/em>,\u201d Mehta says. \u201cThe conversation has really shifted<\/em>,\u201d she adds, \u201cfrom if this is going to occur, to how it\u2019s going to occur<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The movement got a notable lift in 2021, when a panel of global experts finalized a proposed legal definition for ecocide. Politicians and notable figures, including Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg, have backed the idea, and more than a dozen countries, such as France, Ecuador and Vietnam, have already adopted national laws. Some two dozen more have been engaging in talks, Mehta says. (Vanuatu, the tiny archipelago nation that\u2019s emerged as a global leader in the fight against climate change, has been the strongest advocate.) The ICC, in a sign it\u2019s taking the issue seriously, has hosted ecocide panel discussions, and Mehta also spoke at last month\u2019s World Economic Forum in Davos.<\/p>\n The EU agreement, however, marks the first time an international body has adopted an ecocide-related law \u2013 a development that experts say is likely to reverberate far beyond the continent.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s very significant, and I think it does transform the landscape<\/em>,\u201d says Ebenezer Laryea, an international environmental law professor at the University of Northampton. \u201cUp until this point, whenever you look at a polluting event, the punishment or the main action faced by the perpetrators is that they have to pay damages<\/em>,\u201d he adds. \u201cBut by codifying and enacting legislation which puts, alongside those fines and lawsuits for damages, actual criminal offenses where people can spend time in jail \u2013 I think that\u2019s a huge transformation<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Once the European legislation is finalized, all 27 EU member states will then have two years to use the directive as a baseline to adopt their own national laws, with some national governments, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, likely to adopt laws that are even stronger than the EU mandate. The agreement is likely already having an impact, Mehta says, as major corporations and their legal counsels begin evaluating their practices to make sure they steer clear of any issues. \u201cAnd probably you won\u2019t see it publicly<\/em>,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n Europe\u2019s global economic importance also means that the reach of the legislation is effectively much larger, because multinational firms doing business with the continent will also want to comply. It\u2019s also possible other international bodies \u2013 particularly the African Union, Laryea says, because of that continent\u2019s close cultural and economic ties with Europe \u2013 will be encouraged to adopt their own mandates.<\/p>\n Not that the EU agreement is an absolute victory for environmentalists. The legislation specifically mentions \u201cqualified offenses<\/em>,\u201d a step below the more encompassing \u201cgeneral offenses<\/em>\u201d designation Mehta\u2019s group was pushing for. And rather than mentioning \u201cecocide<\/em>\u201d directly, the text conspicuously refers only to environmental offenses that are \u201ccomparable to ecocide<\/em>\u201d \u2013 a linguistic maneuver experts are interpreting as a kind of political compromise intended to make the law more palatable.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there is some sort of practical reality that the legislators are trying to give effect to<\/em>,\u201d says Laryea, \u201cwhich is, they want to take action on this, but they may not want to go so far or too far as to harm or undermine certain business interests<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The Stop Ecocide movement\u2019s larger goal of adding ecocide to the Rome Statute<\/em> also runs up against another practical elephant in the room: The world\u2019s four largest polluters \u2013 China, the United States, India and Russia \u2013 don\u2019t actually recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court. That means that even while an international ecocide law could potentially allow for the prosecution of a Chinese national, for example, who commits an environmental atrocity in Mexico, which does recognize the court, an American executive who commits an offense in Louisiana would be out of the court\u2019s reach.<\/p>\n But Mehta, who is now anticipating that a Rome Statute<\/em> addition will be in place by the end of the decade, also sees an upside.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest players, pollution-wise, are not [ICC] members, this is true<\/em>,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd obviously there\u2019s quite clearly a drawback, on one level. On the other hand, it means they can\u2019t get in the way, because they don\u2019t have a vote<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n yogaesoteric <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Illegal logging that decimates virgin Romanian forest. Oil spills that blacken the Galician coast. Chemical dumping in the Rhine. The European Union, although highly urbanized and a world leader in many facets of environmental protection, has not been immune to the kind of large-scale ecological devastation more commonly associated with the Americas or Africa. Now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-events-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147017,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147010\/revisions\/147017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/2-3-300x200.jpg\")
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\nFebruary 7, 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n