When Peaceful Protest Is Punished but Ecocide Is Not
By Pia Björstrand, environmental lawyer and partner at Omnia Legal, Stockholm
With its ruling in July, the Swedish Supreme Court offered a much-needed correction to a troubling trend. In a case involving climate activists who briefly blocked a major highway to highlight the importance of wetland restoration and the accelerating climate crisis, the court ruled that the protest did not amount to sabotage. While disruptive, the action was clearly an expression of the demonstrators’ constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and speech.
As an environmental lawyer, I welcomed the decision. But I cannot take comfort in it. Because across Europe, and far beyond, the space for peaceful protest is rapidly shrinking.
In Sweden, dozens of climate activists have been arrested, detained, and charged in recent years for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. These are carefully considered, symbolic acts; road sit-ins, blockades, disruptions designed not to cause harm but to draw attention to it. And yet, participants are being prosecuted under serious criminal charges, including sabotage - a crime that can carry lengthy prison sentences.
In most legal systems, there is a recognised right to act in an emergency, even if doing so involves breaking the law. Given the scale and urgency of the ecological crisis, how can civil disobedience not be morally, and even legally, justified?
The Supreme Court’s ruling is a step in the right direction. It affirms, albeit narrowly, that democracy must make space for moral protest, especially when the law lags behind science and political failure endangers entire ecosystems, along with the lives and livelihoods they sustain. But it should not take a ruling from the country’s highest court to confirm that peaceful protest is not a crime.
The deeper contradiction remains: while those who raise the alarm are being punished, those who profit from the destruction of nature continue with impunity.
Environmental protestor on Lambeth Bridge, London, in 2022. Credit: Alisdare Hickson / Creative Commons 2.0.
This is not just a Swedish problem. In the UK, a wave of anti-protest legislation has led to a dramatic increase in arrests, including of trade unionists, peace activists, and environmental campaigners. Earlier this year, more than 70 people were arrested at a pro-Palestinian march in London - among them union leaders and long-standing civil society figures. Human rights groups and legal scholars have condemned these developments as a dangerous assault on democratic freedoms. The UK’s Public Order Act 2023 has introduced sweeping new offences, such as “locking-on” and “interfering with key infrastructure”, that criminalise protest tactics long used by climate and social justice movements. Under the Act, protesters face prison sentences not only for non-violent direct action, but even for carrying objects deemed “capable” of being used in disruptive protest. Liberty and other civil liberties groups have warned that this legislation marks a profound shift, turning peaceful dissent into a criminal risk.
We are living in a moment where it has become easier to be arrested for calling out ecological collapse than for contributing to it. That reversal of law, morality and priorities is indefensible.
It is also why the movement to criminalise ecocide is gathering momentum.
Ecocide refers to the widespread or long-term destruction of ecosystems, including acts such as catastrophic oil spills, the clear-cutting of ancient forests or the collapse of entire river systems. In 2021, a panel of international legal experts published a clear and practicable definition: “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.”
This definition has become the foundation for a growing global movement to establish ecocide as the fifth core crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.
In 2024, the Pacific Island states of Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a formal proposal to amend the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute to include ecocide as a core international crime. Just weeks later, the Democratic Republic of the Congo became the first African nation to endorse the initiative. Legislators in Scotland, the Dominican Republic, French Polynesia, Italy, Peru and other countries are now advancing national legislation in parallel, signalling a growing international consensus that the mass destruction of nature must be addressed through the mechanisms of criminal law.
At a side event to the 2024 Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute, the Republic of Vanuatu’s Special Envoy for Climate Change and Environment, Ralph Regenvanu, discusses his country’s proposal to make ecocide an international crime. Credit: Patricia Willocq photography.
This momentum extends across regional legal systems. In March 2024, the European Union adopted a revised Environmental Crime Directive requiring member states to criminalise offences “comparable to ecocide” by mid-2026. In May 2025, the Council of Europe followed suit with a new Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law, enabling the prosecution of acts “tantamount to ecocide”. And in a landmark advisory opinion issued earlier this month, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that preventing irreversible environmental harm constitutes a jus cogens norm — a peremptory rule of international law from which no derogation is permitted. The opinion signals a legal paradigm shift and is expected to influence jurisprudence across Latin America and support the growing global recognition of environmental protection as a cornerstone of international human rights law.
I have spent years in courtrooms watching those who peacefully defend life face prosecution while those responsible for its destruction walk free. Ecocide law draws a necessary boundary - legal, moral, ecological - that some harms are too grave to permit. It declares that the right to a habitable planet cannot be sacrificed for political convenience or short-term economic gain.
The Swedish Supreme Court correctly rejected the notion that peaceful protest constitutes sabotage. Yet environmental defenders still face prosecution while the most egregious crimes against nature escape justice.
We need laws that match the scale of the crisis and we must protect the essential role of peaceful protest in any functioning democracy. Those who raise the alarm about mass environmental destruction are not a threat to society; they are essential to its survival.