The biggest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in recent decades, is what President Volodymyr Zelensky called the destruction of the dam on the Dnipro River. If Russia is responsible for this, it could be ‘ecocide’, deliberate and large-scale destruction of the natural environment. The Ukrainian public prosecutor immediately announced an investigation into a war crime and ecocide yesterday.
Many lawyers have been arguing for some time to include ecocide as a separate crime in international law, alongside war crimes and genocide, among others. But we are not there yet. However, the number of countries where ecocide is mentioned in criminal law is growing. Ukraine is one of them – just like Russia, by the way. Article 441 of the Ukrainian Penal Code defines ecocide as “the large-scale destruction of flora and fauna, poisoning of air and water, and all other acts leading to an environmental disaster.”
Also view this photo series: Before and after: aerial photos show the consequences of the dam break in the Dnipro
Many lawyers have been arguing for some time to include ecocide as a separate crime in international law
Environmental damage has so far occupied a modest place in international law. The 1998 Rome Statute, which formed the basis of the International Criminal Court, states that prosecution is possible if an attack is launched that is clear to cause “widespread, long-lasting and severe damage to the natural environment.” The prosecution must then be able to prove that such an attack is ‘excessive’ in relation to any military advantage.
Strict requirements
But what is ‘excessive’? When British soldiers destroyed two dams in the Ruhr area in 1943, killing 1,200 to 1,600 people, they felt it was a justified military operation. According to professor of international law Philipe Sands, director of the Center for International Courts and Tribunals, it is important to set strict ‘requirements’ for ecocide. With a group of international lawyers, he drew up a definition of the term, which explicitly states that “all environmental damage can fall under it”, he explained last year in NRC.
Ukraine has extensively documented environmental damage since the beginning of the war, in order to hold Russia accountable after the war. But according to Sands, it won’t be easy to prove that Russian tanks roaming through a sensitive protected natural area, attacks on chemical plants that endanger drinking water supplies, bombing power plants and even high-risk fighting near nuclear power plants are classified as ecocide. could be. It “depends on how extensive and severe the damage ultimately turns out to be,” Sands said.
Read also: Will trees soon have a voice in court?
Dangerous forces
However, the destruction of the Nova Kachovka dam is of a different order than any previous environmental damage. According to a 1977 protocol to the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War (1949), attacks on “installations containing dangerous forces,” such as a hydroelectric power station, are not permitted, even if they are legitimate military targets, “if such an attack could lead to the release of dangerous forces and consequent serious casualties among the civilian population”.
But twenty years later, in the Rome Statute, an explicit reference to dams has disappeared. Yet President Zelensky left it there on Tuesday on Twitter no misunderstanding about it. “Now Russia is guilty of vicious ecocide,” he wrote. “Russia is at war with life, with nature, with civilization.”