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”.
The European Parliament’s suggested text had followed a unanimous Legal Affairs Committee vote in March 2023, proposing that ‘Member States shall ensure that any conduct causing severe and either widespread or long-term or irreversible damage shall be treated as an offense of particular gravity and sanctioned as such in accordance with the legal systems of the Member States.’
This closely follows the proposed definition of ecocide as an international crime drafted by an independent panel of experts convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation in 2021², a definition which has triggered rapidly growing government, legal, academic and media interest around the world.
The final text from the EU is in alignment with the spirit of the international definition, and is the first time that a legislative text at the European level has recognised mass destruction of nature as criminal in and of itself.
