Lourdes Uquillas |
Madrid (EFE).- Europe leads the global movement of countries that demand the inclusion of environmental crimes as ecocide after the approval in the European Parliament to penalize with ten years those who cause death, an issue that is expected to be included by the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the fifth international crime.
Added to this are the lawsuits against “government climate inaction” filed by citizens of Switzerland and France and the decision unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly to consult the International Court of Justice (CJI) in The Hague to analyze the degree of compliance with the international commitments of all member countries.
This step occurs “when the European Directive on environmental crimes is being negotiated,” Maite Mompó, the director of the Stop Ecocide campaign in Spain, explained to EFE, an international movement that leads the inclusion of ecocide as a crime in Europe, with the ” work of many parliamentarians and above all that of the French MEP Marie Toussaint”.
According to the Stop Ecocide Foundation, it was the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, who in 1972 noted ecocide as a global problem during the Earth Summit in Stockholm when he touched on the subject of the Vietnam War and it was discussed during the writing of the Rome Statute in the 1990s, but was eliminated by the position of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands.
However, the Stop Ecocide Foundation brought together the International Panel of Independent Experts two years ago that defined ecocide as “an unlawful or arbitrary act carried out with the knowledge that there is a substantial probability that it will cause extensive or lasting serious damage to the environment.” .
Mompó has underlined “the importance of the decision”, because before the approval in the EP, the issue has gone through “five parliamentary advisory committees, and all of them corroborated the inclusion of ecocide in the directive for the treatment of environmental crimes” , in a process that has gone “step by step since 2022” and that must now go through the European Council and Commission.
In addition, according to Mompó, “another historical aspect is that the Assembly of the Council of Europe also approved a resolution in which it declared itself in favor of codifying ecocide in national and international law.”
He stressed that, once the inclusion is approved by the European Trilogue, that is, the European Parliament, Council and Commission, “it must be transferred to national legislation and the penal codes of the countries of the European Union, “it opens a path” towards the inclusion as a fifth international crime by the ICC, and “thus shows its solidarity” with the countries with the least possibilities of regulating these crimes.
On the possibility that these crimes are punished only on European soil or spread to countries with more lax legislation, where some companies develop projects, Mompó has indicated that “it will depend on how it is legislated, because right now the text of the directive of Environmental Crimes, so we have to wait to see how it is typified”.
Likewise, the director of Stop Ecocidio has praised the decision unanimously adopted this Wednesday at the United Nations General Assembly.
For her part, the deputy of Más País Verdes Equo, Inés Sabanés Nadal, has indicated that the study in the Trilogue, “in principle” could already begin with the current Swedish Presidency of the EU, but it could be extended with the Spanish Presidency, although it is a matter yet to be confirmed”.
Sabanés has said that it is a “historic decision”, with an “extremely positive assessment”, in a resolution in which “the European Green Party has been working for a long time” and will mark a “before and after in terms of impunity with which environmental crimes have been produced”.
The fact that “a repeated, systematic, intentional action that can cause permanent damage to the environment can be considered a crime in criminal terms, will be an absolute deterrent for actions such as the Mar Menor, Doñana and many other examples in Spain ”, which “repeatedly put spaces of enormous value at risk”.
The deputy has stressed the importance of the Government of Spain and the rest of the European governments supporting the decision of the EP to include it in the Directive on environmental crimes and has warned that her party will insist that Spain approve the proposal.
In addition, this decision of the EP has to “positively affect the other line of action that is that of the ICC”, he has asserted.
