On December 10 2023, the Coalition for International Criminal Justice (CICJ) issued a statement calling upon the States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to establish a Special Working Group on Ecocide.

Stop Ecocide Foundation was at the 22nd Session of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, United Nations, New York, 4 to 14 December 2023.

We were delighted that Stop Ecocide International, and our Stop Ecocide Foundation, had a strong presence during COP28 in December 2023.

The Global Tipping Points report 2023 was produced by The University of Exeter's Global Systems Centre and sees contributions from 200 authors and 25 institutions. The report names Ecocide Law as one of a series of ‘Positive Tipping Points’ in technology, economy and society which offer hope in the face collapsing systems in the natural world.

The 'Ecocide Bill', introduced as a Private Members Bill by Baroness Rosie Boycott, aims to close an existing gap in UK criminal law which allows perpetrators of the most severe environmental harms to escape accountability. 

The EU has agreed to enshrine in law a new offence that aims to punish the most serious crimes against the environment. The final text emerged following several months of negotiation (“trilogues”) between the European Council, Commission and Parliament considering, inter alia, the establishment of a “qualified offence” aimed at preventing and punishing the gravest environmental harms including, as the accompanying recitals specify, “cases comparable to ecocide”. 

On November 8th, the Environment and Sustainable Development Committee of the Deputies Chamber of the Brazilian Congress approved Bill No 2933/2023 which aims to criminalize the most serious cases of illegal or wanton destruction of the environment, known as “ecocide”. This Bill has been authored and submitted by the PSOL party and supported by a coalition or organisations including Ecoe Brasil, Climate Counsel, Observatório do Clima and Stop Ecocide International.

Monica Lennon MSP has lodged proposals for a Members’ Bill in the Scottish Parliament asking people to support an ecocide prevention law that could see big polluters jailed for between 10 and 20 years.  

The Nordic Council has voted unanimously during its most recent session in Oslo, Norway to adopt a recommendation calling for ‘the Nordic governments to participate in relevant international discussions to criminalise serious crimes against the natural environment in both wartime and peacetime.’

On August 17, a new law,  Law 21.595 was published in Chile.  It modifies the Penal Code in terms of economic crimes and incorporates a new section on "Attacks against the environment", which includes several elements of the legal definition of ecocide formulated by the Independent Expert  Panel, convened by Stop Ecocide Foundation in 2021. 

Pope Francis has published “Laudate Deum”, an Apostolic Exhortation which is calling on governments to take responsibility on climate change and environmental damage.

Following up from his 2015 “Laudato Sì”, Pope Francis highlights the inarguable human origins for the global climate emergency, and advocates for more international co-operation to control environmental damage.  Pope Francis was also the first Head of State, in 2019, to publicly support the inclusion of ecocide as a crime under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra (Greens and Left Alliance), supported by Stop Ecocidio Italia and Stop Ecocide International, has submitted a bill aimed at preventing and criminalising ecocide to the Italian Parliament.    

The proposed bill, which is directly based on the wording of the legal definition of ecocide formulated by the Independent Expert Panel convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation in 2021, has been formally submitted to parliament, with debate and votes due to take place in the coming months. 

In his opening speech of the 54th Session of the Human Rights Council, Volker Türk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed enthusiasm for inclusion of the international crime of “ecocide” in the Rome Statute of the UN-backed International Criminal Court as a potential measure to ensure accountability for environmental damage, saying: 

"An international crime of ecocide has been proposed for inclusion in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court by a number of States and civil society groups. I welcome consideration of this and other measures to expand accountability for environmental damage, both at the national and international level.”

The Taskforce on Nature Markets, an initiative of Geneva-based non-profit Nature Finance working across public policy and the finance world to “align global finance with climate resilient, nature positive and equitable outcomes”, has issued its in-depth report Making Nature Markets Work.

The report directly recommends establishing an criminal offence of ecocide in order to deter, prevent and hold accountable those engaging in illegal nature markets.

On 30 July, Deputy Karina Marlen Barrón Perales (PRI) proposed adding a new article to Mexico's Federal Penal Code which would impose 10 to 15 years in prison and a fine of 1,000 to 1,500 pesos per day on anyone who perpetrates "any unlawful or wanton act committed with the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment”.

The Catalan Parliament has initiated a procedure to bring before the National Congress of Deputies a bill to include the crime of ecocide in the Spanish Penal Code. From here, the proposal will continue its progress. There will be several months of hearings in which amendments can be introduced to the text, after which a final vote will take place at the Catalan Parliament.

On Thursday 20th July, the Belgian Council of Ministers approved the second reading of a bill outlining proposed reforms to the nation’s penal code. Among the new crimes listed for inclusion is Ecocide. Pending approval by Parliament later this year, the development sees Belgium set to become the twelfth country to add the crime to its statute books.

Member of Parliament Lammert van Raan of Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the Animals), officially launched a law proposal to criminalise ecocide in the Netherlands.

The proposal is currently subject to four weeks of public consultation prior to being submitted for advisory opinion to the Council of State. For the bill to become law, it will then need to be approved by Parliament.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has called on parliaments of its participating States to enshrine the concept of ecocide in national and international law.

Once every five years, representatives from Green Parties, Indigenous communities, civil society, academia, charities and NGOs from all over the world come together at the Global Greens Congress to take stock of the current state of the world and establish key policy priorities for the coming years. Among this year’s selected strategies for endorsement (all of which can be read in the Korea Declaration) was the growing global initiative to establish an international crime of ecocide. 

At a UN Security Council open debate on the effects of climate change on peace and security, Austrian Ambassador Alexander Marschik raised the issue of widespread and longterm damage to the environment.  He suggested that “the international community should consider making [such damage] a crime under international law — referred to as “ecocide”.

On World Ocean Day 2023, the celebrated oceanographer and conservationist Sylvia Earle joined other world leaders, such as Pope Frances and Jane Goodall, in support of the recognition of “ecocide” as an international crime, as advocated by global NGO Stop Ecocide International.

The breach of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine has displaced the Dnipro River, killed an unknown number of people and animals, and left many Ukrainians homeless. The immediate human consequences of the dam’s destruction have already been devastating and its ecological impacts, though still being assessed, have been repeatedly referred to as “ecocide”¹.

The Brazilian political party PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade) submitted a new Ecocide Bill to the Brazilian Congress. The proposed ecocide law seeks to criminalise “performing illegal or wanton acts with the knowledge that they generate a substantial probability of serious and widespread or long-term damage to the environment.”

On 9 May, the Spanish government officially answered to a written question submitted by Inés Sabanés Nadal, MP for Más País Verdes Equo, on whether the Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge intended to support the proposal to recognise ecocide and autonomous crimes against the environment in the framework of the European Council.

On 15th April, the world premiere of the Ecocide Law Choir Suite took place at the Jyväskylä University in Finland to an audience of over 300 people. The concert comprised a suite of twelve songs by composers from USA, Great Britain, Scotland, Sweden, Sápmi (Sameland), Finland, Canada, Brazil and Denmark, all of whom have donated their contributions to the Choirs for Ecocide Law project.

On the 29th March, history was written on both sides of the Atlantic.  In Brussels, the European Parliament unanimously proposed including “ecocide” into EU law while in New York, a UN resolution called for a legal Advisory Opinion on the obligations of states with respect to climate change.  

A Vatican statement has repudiated the “doctrine of discovery” - a theory that served to justify seizure of indigenous lands by colonizing powers from the 15th century onwards. The “doctrine”, based on papal bulls of the time, was treated by political powers as a fundamental part of the conceptual structure of colonialism for hundreds of years, even making its way into the legal systems of several countries.

Following a historic unanimous Legal Affairs Committee vote, the European Parliament has announced its support for the inclusion of “ecocide”-level crimes in the EU’s revised environmental crime directive.

The Prime Minister of Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, is hopeful that the upcoming leadership summit of the Council of Europe will produce some positive developments on the matter of ecocide. 

Jakobsdóttir expressed her optimism in the Icelandic parliament during a discussion responding to a parliamentary inquiry on the matter of ecocide from MP Andrés Ingi Jónsson of the Pirate Party on 20 March 2023.