Ecocide law: the next big moral and legal shift
Jojo Mehta is the CEO and Co-Founder of Stop Ecocide International.
Between 1961 and 1971, more than 20mn gallons of toxic herbicides were sprayed over Vietnam’s forests and farmland in the name of military strategy. Agent Orange — a chemical designed to defoliate trees and destroy crops — left devastation in its wake: poisoned water, deformed children, obliterated ecosystems.
Around 20 per cent of the country’s tropical forests were stripped bare, and many never recovered. It was an assault on life in all its forms, and it happened with total legal impunity.
That horror prompted a shift in understanding — and in language. Arthur Galston, a Yale biologist whose early plant research contributed to the chemical foundation of Agent Orange, was appalled by its use. In 1970, he proposed a new word: ecocide.
Ranch Hand Program: Four-ship formation on a defoliation spray run (Vietnam, 1960). Credit: US AirForce.
He argued it should be recognised as an international crime. Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme used the term at the 1972 UN environment summit, calling the Vietnam defoliation a ‘crime against nature’.
But the concept never made it into law. In discussions that preceded negotiation of the Rome statute — the treaty that established the International Criminal Court — proposals to include serious environmental destruction as a core international crime were raised, but ultimately excluded by the time the treaty was signed in 1998.
When the ICC opened its doors in 2002, it had jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. With the exception of one highly specific sub-clause under war crimes, environmental harm — even on a catastrophic scale — was left outside its scope.
A quarter of a century later, that gap in international criminal law is being revisited — this time driven not only by the urgent requirement to protect threatened ecosystems and communities, but with serious legal architecture to support it.
In 2021, a panel of top international lawyers convened by our charitable arm, the Stop Ecocide Foundation, produced a consensus legal definition of ecocide: “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.” Carefully aligned with the existing framework of international criminal law, this definition has become a foundation for legislative efforts now unfolding around the world.
Some countries, including Belgium and France, have already adopted the concept of ecocide into domestic law, while Ukraine has resurrected a dormant legal provision of its own and is actively prosecuting cases.
Many others are currently advancing legislation, including the Netherlands, Peru, Argentina, Italy and Scotland, where the Ecocide (Scotland) Bill was formally lodged in parliament just a few weeks ago.
These national efforts are part of a broader legal transformation. The EU has recently revised its Environmental Crime Directive to include offences “comparable to ecocide”, necessitating harmonisation by member states before summer 2026.
Just last month, the Council of Europe, representing 46 member states, adopted a groundbreaking convention on the protection of the environment through criminal law, enabling prosecution of environmental destruction “tantamount to ecocide”; this treaty is now open for signature.
At the international level, momentum continues to build. Ecocide is now formally on the table at the ICC, thanks to a coalition of climate-vulnerable Pacific island nations — Vanuatu, Samoa and Fiji — which, in September 2024, submitted a proposal to amend the Rome statute and establish ecocide as the court’s fifth core international crime. That proposal is now backed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a global legal norm is rapidly taking shape.
The Deputy Prosecutor of the ICC discusses the formal proposal to make ecocide a new international crime at an official side event to the 2024 Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC in December. Credit: Patricia Willocq.
Ecocide law is about protecting vital ecosystems – and the ordinary citizens whose lives and livelihoods depend upon them – from harms inflicted recklessly by the most powerful in society. By introducing personal criminal liability, it prevents individuals from hiding behind the “corporate veil” or political privilege — and, most importantly, serves as a powerful deterrent, helping to prevent the worst harms before they happen.
Public support is now firmly behind this emerging legal standard: across G20 countries, 72 per cent of people support criminalising executives and policymakers who authorise or enable mass environmental destruction.
This groundswell reflects more than a demand for accountability — it signals a deeper shift in legal and moral consciousness. People are increasingly rejecting the Enlightenment-era fiction that humans exist in separation from the natural world.
That illusion, which has never fooled indigenous communities, is being dismantled by ecological breakdown and lived experience. Ecocide law puts it in the simplest of terms: when we destroy nature at scale, we endanger not only the living world, but the social and economic foundations that depend upon it.
This is not just a legal innovation. It’s a long-overdue correction, one that will be welcomed as an essential safety rail for a threatened biosphere that includes us all. As pioneering barrister Polly Higgins, my late Co-Founder, once put it: “the earth is in need of a good lawyer”. That legal brief is now being written — in Kinshasa, Strasbourg, Lima, and Edinburgh.
The question is no longer whether international criminal law will catch up — but when.