Working to Stop Ecocide

Genocide. War crimes. Crimes against humanity. Crimes of aggression. These are among the gravest crimes a person can commit. They are also the four crimes that can land defendants in front of the International Criminal Court, a court of last resort that prosecutes those who have enjoyed impunity in their national jurisdictions. If Jojo Mehta has her way, we’ll soon see fifth crime on the list: Ecocide, generally defined as causing severe, widespread, and long-lasting damage to the environment.

As co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, Mehta has for years been working tirelessly towards this goal. But she wasn’t always an international environmental activist. Until about a decade ago, she was, as she puts it, more of an armchair activist. Then, one day, her daughter, who was five at the time, burst into tears overhearing a conversation Mehta was having about fracking, and implored her to do something to help those impacted. That got her “out of the armchair,” she says, and on the path to on-the-ground activism.

Not long afterwards, Mehta met Polly Higgins, a lawyer who, at the time, was leading the international ecocide movement. Mehta was taken with Higgins’s campaign for an international law against ecocide, and the two ended up co-founding Stop Ecocide. They worked together for several years until Higgins passed away in 2019. “And then I suppose I kind of inherited a global campaign,” Mehta says, one that she’s grown dramatically over the past few years.

When we spoke about her work over Zoom this spring, her passion was palpable. Mehta thinks that it is inevitable that we will criminalize ecocide, potentially within a matter of years. And when we do, she envisions a truly radical cultural shift: a new paradigm in which we take environmental destruction as seriously as the destruction of human life, and in which corporate CEOs dramatically rethink their liabilities when it comes to damaging the Earth.

The campaign to criminalize ecocide has been picking up steam recently. What are some of the recent milestones?

I think probably the biggest leap in this work happened in 2021, when our foundation commissioned a group of top lawyers from around the world to draft a legal definition of ecocide that would be a consensus-credible definition that could be taken to a government, to potentially put forward at the International Criminal Court. And that was a massive thing, because over the decades there have been various definitions of ecocide, mostly by one lawyer or a couple of lawyers. There hasn’t ever been a coming together of lawyers from different parts of the world, different legal backgrounds, actually coming up with a core definition that would be politically discussable, credible, and proposable, if you like.

Jojo Mehta is co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International. Photo by Ruth Davey / Look Again Photography.

And what’s been so remarkable is that the definition itself, the core of it, is so concise that it fits on the back of a business card. It’s just one sentence: Ecocide means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there’s a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. That’s it; it’s very straightforward.

It’s really kind of picked up momentum around the world. We’re now in a position where over 25 countries that are members of the International Criminal Court are discussing ecocide at parliamentary or government levels, as compared to a virtually nonexistent conversation three or four years ago. So, this has been a really, really rapid rise in focus. There’s a sense now that ecocide or something like it will come into law relatively soon, because it will have to.

What would be the next step to create this fifth crime at the International Criminal Court?

Formally speaking, a state, or ideally a group of states, needs to propose a text to amend the statute. And then that needs to be negotiated and ultimately adopted into the statutes. And you need a minimum of two-thirds of member states in order to do that.

Really what we’re doing is driving the global conversation around ecocide law. Because what we realize is that it’s governments that have to ultimately agree to this as member states. But politicians like to feel safe. Governments want to feel safe. They want to know they’re not sticking their necks out and doing something that is kind of crazy and out there.

Also, in particular, they’re always interested in how the economic world thinks of this, because that’s always going to be one of the primary concerns of governments, their economic competitiveness, or the economic well-being of their country. So, this year we spent quite a bit of time beginning to engage with the corporate world, with the world of investment, and so on, and really exploring the usefulness of this legal framework. And what we’re finding is very positive.

With criminal law, in a way the whole point of it is it’s meant to be a deterrent. It’s meant to be preventive. Murder isn’t a crime in order to punish murderers, although obviously, that’s part of what it does. It’s actually about preventing people being killed. Criminalizing ecocide basically puts in place a framework that creates a safety rail and says, beyond this level of damage is not acceptable. And not only is it not acceptable, but it will destabilize your investments, it will destabilize your reputation, it will create operational risk.

What we want is for people to actually be looking at the biggest strategic questions their sector needs to address. And that is what this law can offer a framework for. That is hugely empowering.

There are so many ways that people are fighting for our planet, including with existing laws. So how does a law against ecocide really stand out? Is it mainly the deterrent potential you mentioned? Or are there other factors at play as well?

There are three big ones that come to mind. And one is, as I said, moving into the criminal law sphere does create this deterrent because it addresses the individual. So, if your personal freedom, your personal reputation, is all on the line, you’re going to be thinking very carefully about the projects that you take on, the things you invest in. That’s one aspect of it.

Another aspect is actually something to do with fundamental cultural shift. Because at the moment, we take damage to human beings very seriously. The international crimes are all around that. By putting ecocide alongside genocide as one of the most serious crimes, what we’re actually saying is: It is as bad, as dangerous, as wrong to destroy ecosystems as it is to destroy people. And ultimately, it actually comes to the same thing. If we continue to destroy ecosystems at the rate we’ve been doing for the last two, three decades, we’re not just looking at destroying a people or a part of the people, we’re looking at a complete collapse of civilization. To put ecocide in that category is a way of starting to have people take the environment more seriously.

And that leads me to the third point. And the third point is this: There are plenty of environmental laws in place. And if everything was followed properly, our environment would be better protected than we know it is. I think this, again, comes to this sort of cultural thing that we simply don’t take environmental destruction seriously enough. What ecocide does is it names the worst harms as crimes — as bad, wrong, unacceptable, below a kind of a red line. That reinforces in a really positive way, actually, how people treat the rest of the body of environmental law.

For the moment, corporations are often tempted to think about environmental regulation as a tick box exercise. It’s like: How much of a certain toxin can we use in a certain environment before it becomes problematic? The way you think about a criminal law is not like that. In a way, ecocide is more like a criminal version of a health and safety regulation. You’re not going to build your factory so that you almost break everybody’s heads open, but not quite. You’re going to actually stay shy of that. You’re going to effectively avoid that hazard. And that’s the kind of attitude that starts to come into play when you put a crime in place.

Breaches of regulatory frameworks that almost pass a bit under the radar will suddenly become potential openings to criminal responsibility. And that creates a very different attitude to how people approach their environmental due diligence.

Let’s say that we had an international law against ecocide tomorrow. What would be the immediate impact?

I’m going to slightly turn that around, because I would say we don’t want to have it tomorrow. And the reason I say we don’t want to have it tomorrow is that I think what people sometimes don’t realize is that the real power of this law is actually in the seeing it coming. That window of time between hearing about it and adopting it, that is the window for strategic change. Because the whole point in a way is that we want corporations and decision-makers and investors to be thinking: Okay, this is coming down the line. Given that, what do we need to do differently?

Given that the ICC doesn’t actually prosecute a lot of cases, does that limit the effectiveness of a crime against ecocide?

The ICC doesn’t have a huge reputation for effectiveness. It’s only taken a small number of prosecutions. That said, there are a number of important aspects about the ICC. One is that it’s the only place where, effectively, even heads of state can be prosecuted. There is no high-level immunity. And that’s really important because it means that it’s aimed at individuals in positions of power. And those might be CEOs, or they might be investors, or they might be heads of state. The knowledge that it has that reach is quite important.

The second thing is, it is the most serious crimes that are listed there. So, by adding ecocide to that list, the message is very, very strong.

Now in practice, ecocide prosecutions are likely to be taken in national jurisdictions. If something’s made a crime at the international level, any country ratifying it will most likely be incorporating it in the same form into its own legislation. Prosecutions can happen anywhere that the crime is ratified.

What’s interesting is we’re seeing that this movement towards an international crime is actually becoming a direction of travel at the national and regional levels. Belgium, for example, is going to be legislating for ecocide this year in domestic law. And at the same time, the EU is busy discussing a revision to its environmental crimes directive, and the EU Parliament has now proposed that the text going forward to the Council and Commission should include a crime of ecocide.

As the movement for the international crime designation advances with more and more countries joining in, more are also inspired to legislate nationally. And the same is true the other way around. It’s a mutually reinforcing process.

Environmental activists are increasingly facing criminal charges for their peaceful protests, including here in the US and in the UK, where you are based. Do you find it troublesome that environmental protests are criminalized while ecocide still is not?

Yeah, it’s completely insane. And I think this absolutely highlights the importance of criminalizing ecocide. Because once you do that, you’re actually flipping the narrative 180 degrees. Instead of being able to portray these environmental defenders as criminals interrupting legitimate business, what you’re doing is putting a question mark over the business activity. And even if that business activity ultimately isn’t prosecuted, the very fact that it could be is going to be a massive reframing exercise for those defenders. From being portrayed as criminals, they become the moral upholders of the law. And that’s a very different place to be.

You’ve set a big task for yourself. What fuels you to keep fighting?

I think one aspect is just not thinking of it as a fight. If you’re an environmental defender and the fight is being brought to you by some big company, yes, you have to fight, of course you do. But we don’t see what we’re doing as a struggle, or a fight. Because we see it as something inevitable that is going to benefit everybody. There’s a little bit of a tendency that if you see yourself as having an enemy, you create opponents. We don’t see anyone as our opponent because they are going to benefit from it.

What do you suggest for anyone who is inspired by your campaign? How can they get involved?

The word ecocide itself is a big part of what makes this work so powerful. It’s a word that has power itself and that has all of this internal momentum. There are some amazing laws being discussed. For example, there’s an effort to enact a legally binding treaty regarding international corporations and their human rights violations. But if you stop someone in the street and you start talking about that, they are going to be asleep by the third word. Just discussing ecocide is hugely important and powerful. Everybody has networks. Bringing this into your conversation is a really important thing to do.

And, of course, you can join the campaign. We call our signed-up members Earth Protectors.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

I have to say, this initiative could prove to be the most exciting legislative step that we take this century. This is a legacy piece. When this is in place, with the momentum and direction of travel that has already been established, I think we are looking at a real cultural shift that is going to take place. And there is nothing more exciting than being involved in something like that.

Join us. Help us. Let’s get it done.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.