Taking ecocide beyond the boundaries of the laws of war and making it a crime to be included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court alongside genocide and crimes against humanity. This is an idea that has been debated for some time, and is now being relaunched at university level, thanks to the UNESCO Chair in "Economic Systems and Human Rights" established at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata: we are in Argentina, but there is a strong Italian dimension to the proposal, given that La Plata is the city with the highest concentration of Italians in the entire South American country, and given that the chair's director is thoroughly Italian himself — Professor Francesco Vigliarolo. According to him, what is at stake is a far from trivial shift in legal category: today, international law recognises environmental damage as a crime only if committed during an armed conflict; the proposal calls for it to be recognised as an offence against the human community as a whole, regardless of whether a state of war or peace exists.

Stop Ecocidio @StopEcocidioOf

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🌎El reconocimiento del ecocidio como delito grave está adquiriendo un gran impulso en América Latina.

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Ecocide as a crime against humanity

At the heart of Francesco Vigliarolo's proposal is a critique of the way economic science has treated the environment and human rights for decades: as "externalities", that is, as issues external to economic calculation rather than as a constitutive part of the common good. "Individual interest cannot take precedence over transversal goods, transversal wellbeing, the sociocultural infrastructures that unite us," said Vigliarolo, presenting his idea in recent days at the Chamber of Deputies. The proposal rests on a specific idea: human rights as a tool for refounding the economy on a universal scale. Starting from a key principle: the environment placed at the foundation of economic systems, in a world — he observed — where disposing of waste produced by the Global North elsewhere "means not impoverishing, but destroying communities" and, in the long term, the planet itself.

On this foundation rests the etymological reading of the term: ecocide, from oikos, "house", is for Vigliarolo "the killing of humanity's home". A reference that brings us back to the historical origins of the concept, coined in the 1970s in relation to the use of Agent Orange, a powerful chemical herbicide and defoliant used by the United States Army during the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1971 to destroy forests for military purposes.

The power of a global crime

Today the Rome Statute, dating back to 1998, recognises environmental damage as a crime only under Article 8, as a war crime: it punishes attacks that knowingly cause "severe, widespread and long-term" damage to the environment, but only in an international armed conflict and only if disproportionate to the expected military advantage. Damage in peacetime and the conduct of corporations and non-state actors fall outside its scope, given that the Court judges only natural persons. The term ecocide, coined in 1970 in the context of Agent Orange in Vietnam, has never had a binding legal definition, despite more recent codification attempts, including that of the Stop Ecocide International coalition (2021). Pushing in this direction is also the Council of Europe, which through resolutions 2398 (2021) and 2477 (2023) invited member states to introduce the crime of ecocide into national legislation and to consider its recognition as a crime of universal jurisdiction. A committee of experts has been working since 2022 on a new convention to that effect.

Stop Ecocide International @EcocideLaw

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Did you know that the @intlcrimcourt has committed itself to investigating and prosecuting environmental crimes?

The new policy (announced end of last year) is a huge milestone for environmental criminal law!

Learn more: stopecocide.earth/bn-2025/histor…

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The European Union introduced a historic turning point in climate justice with the new Directive 2024/1203 on the criminal protection of the environment: the text introduces for the first time "qualified" offences, a legal category entirely comparable to the crime of ecocide. This measure severely punishes the most serious ecological disasters, including massive, widespread and irreversible environmental damage. Those responsible face custodial sentences of up to ten years and devastating financial penalties for multinationals. Directives, however, require approval by individual member states, and in any case remain confined to the Old Continent alone. What is still missing is the qualifying step: making ecocide a crime recognised and prosecuted at the global level. It is within this framework — one that recognises ecocide only in wartime and only under certain conditions — that the proposal discussed at Montecitorio fits: to make it, precisely, a crime against humanity.