Two years after Polly Higgins passed, the seed she planted has broken through the soil. This June an independent panel of international lawyers, convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, published a legal definition of Ecocide, ready to be added to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court beside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.
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 definition of Ecocide proposed by the Independent Expert Panel, June 2021
When Para PachaMama shared the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010, and stood with Polly in 2016 for Earth law, the idea of Ecocide as a crime against Peace was still a dream held by a few. Now it has words a court can use, and the words are carefully chosen, so that the gravest harms to the living world can be named for what they are.
A definition is not yet a law, and the nations of the world still have to take it up. Yet every great change begins this way, first as a feeling in the heart, then as a word, then as a shared knowing, and finally as the way things are done.
Published by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide, 22 June 2021. Read In Memory of Polly Higgins.