Under rules of the European Commission, or EC, a European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI) allows EU residents to collaborate in designing EU law and policy.

 

Effective April 1, 2012, the provision is part of the Treaty of Lisbon and aims at expanding “direct democracy” among its members. The current initiative, operating under the aegis of the organization End Ecocide in Europe (EEI), intends to make ecocide unlawful among member states of the European Union, or EU.

In order to succeed, the EEI is seeking signatures from voting-age residents to reach the one-million mark required for consideration by the Commission. After that milestone, environmental litigation will be able to operate in a court of law without the handicap of corporate buyouts, bankruptcies and foot-dragging, as occurred in the case of Chevron v. Ecuador.

 

Ecocide: Crime Against Peace

For those outside the EU, international environmental attorney Polly Higgins has already done the groundwork in an effort to make Ecocide the 5th International Crime Against Peace, right after genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.

Higgins, who defined ecocide to the United Nations (UN) as,

The extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished

Higgins hopes that this wider, global referendum will also give environmental litigation the kind of clout enjoyed by defective product litigation, for example. In other words, until concerned nations have a law to “prosecute those who destroy the planet” the world’s corporations will never be held responsible for their crimes against the environment, or be required to acquit themselves before an International Criminal Court.

 

Ecocide: The Domestic Crime

The proposed law is precisely what environmental groups and advocates have been asking for since the 1970s. Even though 10 member nations of the EU view ecocide as a domestic crime, there is no universal law, and this creates a minefield of standards that even the bravest of litigants does not dare cross.

Higgins and her Ecocide warriors are to be commended for their vision and purpose, as they follow a path already worn in the grass by indigenous people around the globe, notably those in Central and South America – countries already decimated by the corporate tendency to “throw their trash bags over the fence”, so to speak.

In fact, very few individuals outside the mainstream polysci community foresaw, in 2008, the kind of clout that indigenous people and their elected leaders could, and would, bring to bear against corporate polluters and the destruction of regional drinking water supplies, tillable earth, native forests and fields, and localized species, particularly in nations of the Southern half of the Americas.

Where did this passionate and highly verbal (and physical) protest against the treatment of their environment come from?

From the environmental impacts of the maquiladora culture that once despoiled so much of Mexico, Central America and South America. This culture, the trademark of corporations whose consciences recognize only profit – and whose leaders apparently think it okay to poison the water and starve the people to make blue jeans, so long as the people who can actually afford to buy  the jeans don’t have to see or live with the resultant destruction – was one of the first results of outsourcing manufacture.

 

Global Protection Measures

In 2008, under President Rafael Correa, Ecuador stunned the environmental world by successfully incorporating protective measures for the environment in its 2008 Constitution. In 2010, UN Secretary-General Ba Ki-moon and the UN General Assembly proclaimed April 22 as International Mother Earth Day. In 2012, Evo Morales Ayma, an Aymara tribesman and the first truly indigenous president in the world, followed suit, putting Ecuador on a similar path.

Fast forward to March of 2013 and the Organization End Ecocide in Europe takes off the gloves with a bold but intriguingly simple platform: environmental destruction must become a crime! Moreover, it must become the sort of felony which the law can use to hold corporate, nonprofit, or even individual feet to the fire in the wake of profound environmental degradation.

 

Ecocide: Origins and Movement

The word ecocide comes from two Greek terms, “oikos” meaning home, and “caedere” meaning to strike down or demolish. As ECI spokespersons note, this means, quite literally, killing our home, which is precisely what is happening, now at a macro level as scientists and researchers report the rapid retreat of Arctic and Antarctic ice; a retreat that has no historic comparison.

The EU component of the law will be activated when:

  • Ecocide occurs within an EU territory, including within maritime boundaries
  • EU companies are involved
  • EU citizens are involved
  • The resultant product, or activity, is based on ecocidal behaviors

Taken together, the four points provide an all-inclusive platform from which to establish both guilt and penalties. Hopefully, these penalties will not be similar to those levied by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which often renovates brown-fields using taxpayer money instead of assessing the industries responsible.

Such a law, if extant today, would put a swift halt to tar sands mining, fracking, mountaintop removal for coal, and gold mining via mercury, cyanide and arsenic – all of which eventually leach into groundwater and from there into drinking water.

 

 

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