- cross-posted to:
- legalnews@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- legalnews@lemmy.zip
Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa want international criminal court to class environmental destruction as crime alongside genocide
Three developing countries have taken the first steps towards transforming the world’s response to climate breakdown and environmental destruction by making ecocide a punishable criminal offence.
In a submission to the international criminal court on Monday, they propose a change in the rules to recognise “ecocide” as a crime alongside genocide and war crimes.
If successful, the change could allow for the prosecution of individuals who have brought about environmental destruction, such as the heads of large polluting companies, or heads of state.
On top of that can you imagine the US actually punishing its heads of state for anything on behalf of an international organization?
The US is literally funding and helping carry out the genocide and war crimes against an entire people with absolute impunity. Its two parties fully support it. Its corporations and universities fully collude with it and name and shame employees and students that don’t in public, so their livelihoods are affected.
It seems all these international organizations can do is publish statements that the law is being broken. At least the history books have a legal, contemporary point of view, i guess. Peak performative justice.
It’s not just the US. Most countries aren’t doing any meaningful change to counter climate change. It’s just net zero by 2300, ban straws here, make stupid soda caps that stick to the bottle, performative trash separation that gets dumped together, magic carbon offsetting and climate summits of empty promises that overall net more pollution due to heads of state and heads of corporations traveling somewhere rather than if it hadn’t happened at all. Just kicking the can down the road, while living through the hottest summers on record.