On 20 June 2024, Catherine Savard, a Canadian human rights lawyer and MPhil in Law Candidate at the University of Oxford, presented her research on the emerging prohibition of ecocide under international law at the Academy Talk.
Ms Savard’s presentation explored the possibilities and challenges of prosecuting ecocide by amending the Rome Statute to include environmental crimes as a separate crime. The talk lay open the complexities of criminalising ecocide at the international level considering the rising devastation of war on the environment and human beings by extension. Specifically, discussions centred around the need to streamline the current proposal for the definition of ecocide. The presentation also delved into how national jurisdictions, Belgium in particular, have dealt with prosecuting ecocide following the EU Environmental Crimes Directive.
This timely discourse follows the Nuremberg Academy’s contribution to the Comment on the future of prosecuting environmental crimes at the International Criminal Court. (ds)