ICL and Environmental Protection Symposium: Can Ecocide Save the Planet? An International Crime of Climate Change

Jun 3, 2020 | Kate Mackintosh
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The appeal of using international criminal law to protect the environment is intuitive: the destruction of our environment poses the greatest contemporary threat to the values that body of law seeks to protect: human rights, human health, global security – perhaps even human survival. And the threat is both massive and transnational in character. However, while environmental experts concur that climate change is the environmental issue, it proves the most difficult aspect of environmental destruction to capture in international criminal law. This post examines how an international crime of contributing to climate change could fit into accepted notions of international criminal law.