Culminating in Vanuatu’s long-anticipated proposal to amend Article 5 of the Rome Statute with a new international crime last September, the burgeoning ecocide conversation has recently reached new heights.
Various jurisdictions, including Belgium and the European Union, have passed ecocide-inspired environmental criminal laws in past months. A freshly launched Ecocide Law Advisory, composed of several legal experts and parliamentarians, has elaborated a Manual on the National Criminalisation of Ecocide to assist countries in implementing the revamped EU Environmental Crime Directive and/or drafting penal reforms. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Office of the Prosecutor is expected to release a new Policy on Environmental Crimes any day now, while political momentum for the proposed Rome Statute amendment seems to be building behind the scenes.
With all eyes fixed on the ICC, the first international legal instrument to reference ecocide passed almost unnoticed last month. On 14 May 2025, the Council of Europe’s (CoE) Committee of Ministers unanimously adopted the new Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law. The Convention prides itself in being the ‘first international legally binding instrument to address environmental crime’ and was celebrated as a ‘model for global reform’ by the advocacy organisation Stop Ecocide.
Is this praise justified? In this blog post, I sketch the Convention’s peculiar history, discuss some of its innovations, and situate its contribution in the context of the wider ecocide debate.
A Second Chance
Curiously, the recently adopted Convention is not the first instrument bearing this name. As early as 1998, after nearly two decades of preparatory work, the CoE adopted its first Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law. Despite attracting 14 signatures, however, only one state ultimately ratified the treaty. The reasons for its failure were varied, but can at least partially be attributed to its expanded scope of criminality, which went far beyond the domestic rules in place in most CoE member states at the time.
Still, the 1998 Convention provided the impetus for the EU to reinforce its growing environmental legislation with teeth in the form of criminal penalties. After a protracted legal battle over the EU’s competence in criminal matters, the Environmental Crime Directive (2008/99) was finally passed in 2008. In many respects, however, Directive 2008/99 was much narrower in scope and ambition than the 1998 Convention. As a result, it largely failed to attain the desired effect and led to persistent critiques among scholars and legal professionals alike – particularly so against the backdrop of a rapidly growing environmental criminal sector in Europe as well as internationally.
The European Commission eventually heeded critics’ calls and tabled a significantly expanded draft directive in 2021. Following constructive negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council, Directive 2024/1203 was adopted on 11 April 2024 and entered into force one month later.
In parallel with the developments at the EU level, the CoE, too, began to revisit its work on environmental crime. In 2020, the European Committee on Crime Problems (one of the CoE’s Steering Committees under the authority of the Committee of Ministers) commissioned an ad-hoc working group to study the feasibility of elaborating a new CoE treaty. Following the working group’s positive verdict, a Committee of Experts on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law (PC-ENV) was set up in late 2022 and entrusted with the task of drafting a successor to the 1998 Convention.
The PC-ENV – composed of representatives of the CoE’s 46 member states, but also of the EU Commission, international organisations and three civil society organisations (the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime, Wild Legal, and the Wildlife Justice Commission) – met five times between April 2023 and October 2024 to hash out a new draft. After gaining unanimous approval from the European Committee on Crime Problems, the draft treaty and its accompanying explanatory report were forwarded to the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly, which made further amendment proposals in Opinion 305 of 10 April 2025. The Parliamentary Assembly’s suggestions were largely ignored, however (the Parliamentary Assembly has no veto power), and the Committee of Ministers approved the PC-ENV’s version substantially unaltered at its 134th session in Luxembourg on 14 May 2025.
Something Borrowed, Something New
Any attentive reader will quickly notice that the Convention is heavily influenced by the EU’s revised Environmental Crime Directive 2024/1203. Indeed, by September 2023 (before the adoption of Directive 2024/1203!), EU member states had granted the EU Commission a broad mandate to participate in the PC-ENV ‘to protect the integrity of Union law and to ensure consistency between the rules of international law and Union law.’ Armed with this mandate, the EU Commission became a driving force in the negotiations.
Considering that the EU won the legislative race, and since EU member states command a lot of political leverage within the CoE, it should come as no surprise that many of the Convention’s provisions were either directly copied or adapted from Directive 2024/1203. This applies to the definition of key terms such as ‘ecosystem’ just as much as to the structure and content of the 19 substantive offenses covering pollution, waste, industrial installations, ships, natural resources, and biodiversity. The list of offenses signals a significant expansion, both quantitatively as well as qualitatively, in comparison with the 12 offenses mentioned in the 1998 Convention. Moreover, while the 1998 Convention only required five of these 12 offenses to be criminalised and left it to parties whether to impose criminal or administrative sanctions for the other seven, all 19 offenses included in the 2025 version are unequivocally criminal in character.
The Convention’s contextual thresholds, requiring criminal conduct to be both unlawful and intentional, are also borrowed from Directive 2024/1203 – although the latter is more ambitious in subtle, but important ways. In relation to unlawfulness, the Directive’s Article 3(1) interprets this term broadly to extend not only to flagrant infringements of relevant laws, regulations, and administrative decisions, but also to cases where conduct is in adherence with authorisations that were obtained ‘fraudulently or by corruption, extortion or coercion, or if such authorisation is in manifest breach of relevant substantive legal requirements.’ As Michael Faure has argued, this latter notion of a ‘manifest breach of substantive legal requirements’ is a crucial step forward, for it separates the criminal prohibition from administrative rules and affords the environment a more autonomous standing in criminal law.
Yet, precisely this phrase has been eliminated in the Convention in what must be read as a lamentable effort to reassert the absolute primacy of administrative law in environmental policy. This choice is not only out of touch with the realities on the ground, in which much environmental damage is committed lawfully with the blessing of administrative agencies captured by corporate interests. It also marks a retrogression vis-à-vis the 1998 Convention, which lifted the unlawfulness requirement for pollution crimes that caused death or serious injury to a person or created a significant risk of doing so (Article 2(1)(a)).
As regards the mental element, though generally requiring intentionality, Directive 2024/1203 sets a lower threshold of ‘at least serious negligence’ where the environmental offense in question causes the death of, or serious injury to, persons, substantial damage or a considerable risk of substantial damage to the environment (Article 3(4)). Again, this alternative lower threshold is missing entirely in the 2025 Convention, whereas the 1998 Convention expressly provided for negligence, or alternatively gross negligence, as the appropriate mens rea standard for a number of offenses (Article 3).
Beyond redefining the scope of criminal liability, one of the Convention’s core innovations – and a key improvement vis-à-vis its predecessor – lies in its subsidiary provisions. Here, too, the influence of Directive 2024/1203 is clearly visible. Even before listing the substantive offenses, the Convention sets out detailed obligations in relation to cooperation, coordination, and prevention on environmental crime (Articles 5–11). For instance, parties are required to establish and publish a national strategy on environmental crime, allocate appropriate financial and human resources, adequately train professionals, collect and publish statistical data, and consider establishing specialised judicial and prosecutorial units. Moreover, the Convention insists on corporate liability (Article 34), lays down concrete standards for sanctions (Article 35), considers aggravating circumstances to be taken into account when sentencing (Article 36), obliges states to cooperate ‘to the widest extent possible’ (Article 49).
Another strength is the extent to which the Convention involves and considers a wider variety of stakeholders. In terms of prevention, for instance, it demands that parties engage in awareness-raising and involve civil society and non-governmental organisations in this endeavour, where appropriate (Articles 10–11). Articles 43–45, in turn, provide in great detail for the protection of victims, witnesses, and whistleblowers.
Though less eye-catching than the introduction of new offenses, such procedural and institutional reforms offer a welcome and much-needed framework to strengthen environmental criminal justice across borders. As evaluations of Directive 2008/99 have shown, the low rates of prosecution and conviction experienced thus far are not so much owed to a lack of legal tools as they are to a lack of resources, collaboration, and awareness. This is where the Convention’s greatest contribution may reside.
Ecocide, Strasbourg Style?
Even though the Convention rehauls the entire system of environmental criminal law in Europe, much of the commentary has focused on its contribution to the criminalisation of ecocide. To some extent, this focus is understandable – the CoE itself has advertised the Convention as criminalising ‘conduct resulting in environmental disasters tantamount to ecocide.’
What the CoE and others refer to in particular is Article 31 of the Convention, which establishes a ‘particularly serious offense’ that is complementary to any of the preceding 19 offenses and applies where such offense ‘causes destruction or causes irreversible, widespread and substantial damage, or causes long-lasting, widespread and substantial damage to an ecosystem of considerable size or environmental value, or to a habitat within a protected site, or to the quality of air, soil or water’.
This provision, too, was inspired by the ‘qualified criminal offense’ in Article 3(3) of Directive 2024/1203, something that ecocide advocates had ardently fought for in the negotiation process. Indeed, the Convention’s explanatory report makes clear that Article 31 refers to ‘conduct comparable to “ecocide”, which is already covered by the law of certain States, including some member States to the Council of Europe, and which is being discussed in international fora.’ Moreover, the threshold of ‘long-lasting, widespread, and substantial damage’ resonates with the ‘severe and either widespread or long-term damage’ formulation used by the Stop Ecocide campaign and featured in Vanuatu’s amendment proposal.
Still, the final version of Article 31 remains a far cry from the vision of ecocide as an autonomous environmental crime under international law as promoted by its proponents. For starters, the provision is not labelled ecocide by the Convention itself (though the CoE’s website curiously does call it that), it is only likened to ecocide in the explanatory report. In fact, the word ecocide is only mentioned once in the Convention text – in the preamble, when referring to the Parliamentary Assembly’s repeated (and futile) exhortations for the drafters to consider the notion of ecocide in more detail.
Article 31 is also not an independent crime. In order for the ‘particularly serious offense’ to apply, one or multiple of the 19 primary offenses must be satisfied, in addition to the subsidiary damage threshold in Article 31. That also means that the conduct in question must be both unlawful and intentional. Acts that were carried out in conformity with a valid authorisation are thereby exempted from criminal liability – even where such acts cause destruction or irreversible, widespread and substantial damage. This is a particularly disappointing outcome, since it suggests that administrative approval can legitimise (or at least exempt from criminal liability) even the most atrocious forms of environmental destruction.
As a side note, the drafting of the damage threshold in Article 31 is sloppy, since there are not one, but three distinct thresholds mentioned – ‘destruction,’ ‘irreversible, widespread and substantial damage,’ or ‘long-lasting, widespread and substantial damage’. The relationship between them is highly unclear, and none of these terms are defined anywhere in the Convention or the explanatory report.
The biggest disappointment concerns the consequences of qualifying conduct as a ‘particularly serious offense’, however. Simply put, there are none. Whereas Directive 2024/1203 at least mentions that qualified criminal offenses ‘should be punished with more severe penalties’, the Convention’s explanatory report outright admits that Article 31 ‘does not require the Parties to provide for a particular level of penalties’. Instead, we are told that ‘the drafters opted for the title “particularly serious offence” to clearly highlight that the conduct defined in Article 31 is to be considered particularly serious.’ So much for legal symbolism.
In what concerns ecocide, then, the Convention is a significant step back from the already limited achievements of the EU Directive. This is not an accident but a clear political choice, since the ecocide campaign and the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly had both lobbied hard to include more ambitious language on this front.
Rethinking Environmental Criminal Law
Ultimately, it would be misleading to evaluate the Convention exclusively against the backdrop of the headline-grabbing ecocide debate. The tectonic shifts underway in European environmental criminal law may have been partially sparked by ecocide advocacy, but they stretch far beyond the creation of new offenses. Institutional adjustments such as improved collaboration, victim protection, and dedicated resource allocation may be a lot more meaningful for prosecutorial and judicial practice. The Convention’s drafters clearly embraced a preference for pragmatic reforms over legal symbolism.
Going forward, much will depend on the Convention’s entry into force, which requires ten ratifications. On the one hand, this may seem like a rather steep number, given that the 1998 Convention failed to meet the threshold of three ratifications. On the other hand, the costs of ratification are relatively low for the 27 EU member states, which are anyways required to transpose Directive 2024/1203 into national law by May 2026. To sweeten the deal, the EU Commission further negotiated a special clause in Article 51(2) of the Convention, stipulating that ‘Parties which are member States of the European Union shall, in their mutual relations, apply European Union rules governing the matters within the scope of this Convention.’
Regardless of its eventual political success, the Convention illustrates how the formerly niche field of environmental criminal justice is expanding and changing rapidly in response to a general lack of environmental accountability. It is high time for scholars to look behind the ecocide headlines and pay closer attention to these larger transformations.
The First Ecocide Treaty?
Written by Daniel BertramCulminating in Vanuatu’s long-anticipated proposal to amend Article 5 of the Rome Statute with a new international crime last September, the burgeoning ecocide conversation has recently reached new heights.
Various jurisdictions, including Belgium and the European Union, have passed ecocide-inspired environmental criminal laws in past months. A freshly launched Ecocide Law Advisory, composed of several legal experts and parliamentarians, has elaborated a Manual on the National Criminalisation of Ecocide to assist countries in implementing the revamped EU Environmental Crime Directive and/or drafting penal reforms. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Office of the Prosecutor is expected to release a new Policy on Environmental Crimes any day now, while political momentum for the proposed Rome Statute amendment seems to be building behind the scenes.
With all eyes fixed on the ICC, the first international legal instrument to reference ecocide passed almost unnoticed last month. On 14 May 2025, the Council of Europe’s (CoE) Committee of Ministers unanimously adopted the new Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law. The Convention prides itself in being the ‘first international legally binding instrument to address environmental crime’ and was celebrated as a ‘model for global reform’ by the advocacy organisation Stop Ecocide.
Is this praise justified? In this blog post, I sketch the Convention’s peculiar history, discuss some of its innovations, and situate its contribution in the context of the wider ecocide debate.
A Second Chance
Curiously, the recently adopted Convention is not the first instrument bearing this name. As early as 1998, after nearly two decades of preparatory work, the CoE adopted its first Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law. Despite attracting 14 signatures, however, only one state ultimately ratified the treaty. The reasons for its failure were varied, but can at least partially be attributed to its expanded scope of criminality, which went far beyond the domestic rules in place in most CoE member states at the time.
Still, the 1998 Convention provided the impetus for the EU to reinforce its growing environmental legislation with teeth in the form of criminal penalties. After a protracted legal battle over the EU’s competence in criminal matters, the Environmental Crime Directive (2008/99) was finally passed in 2008. In many respects, however, Directive 2008/99 was much narrower in scope and ambition than the 1998 Convention. As a result, it largely failed to attain the desired effect and led to persistent critiques among scholars and legal professionals alike – particularly so against the backdrop of a rapidly growing environmental criminal sector in Europe as well as internationally.
The European Commission eventually heeded critics’ calls and tabled a significantly expanded draft directive in 2021. Following constructive negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council, Directive 2024/1203 was adopted on 11 April 2024 and entered into force one month later.
In parallel with the developments at the EU level, the CoE, too, began to revisit its work on environmental crime. In 2020, the European Committee on Crime Problems (one of the CoE’s Steering Committees under the authority of the Committee of Ministers) commissioned an ad-hoc working group to study the feasibility of elaborating a new CoE treaty. Following the working group’s positive verdict, a Committee of Experts on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law (PC-ENV) was set up in late 2022 and entrusted with the task of drafting a successor to the 1998 Convention.
The PC-ENV – composed of representatives of the CoE’s 46 member states, but also of the EU Commission, international organisations and three civil society organisations (the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime, Wild Legal, and the Wildlife Justice Commission) – met five times between April 2023 and October 2024 to hash out a new draft. After gaining unanimous approval from the European Committee on Crime Problems, the draft treaty and its accompanying explanatory report were forwarded to the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly, which made further amendment proposals in Opinion 305 of 10 April 2025. The Parliamentary Assembly’s suggestions were largely ignored, however (the Parliamentary Assembly has no veto power), and the Committee of Ministers approved the PC-ENV’s version substantially unaltered at its 134th session in Luxembourg on 14 May 2025.
Something Borrowed, Something New
Any attentive reader will quickly notice that the Convention is heavily influenced by the EU’s revised Environmental Crime Directive 2024/1203. Indeed, by September 2023 (before the adoption of Directive 2024/1203!), EU member states had granted the EU Commission a broad mandate to participate in the PC-ENV ‘to protect the integrity of Union law and to ensure consistency between the rules of international law and Union law.’ Armed with this mandate, the EU Commission became a driving force in the negotiations.
Considering that the EU won the legislative race, and since EU member states command a lot of political leverage within the CoE, it should come as no surprise that many of the Convention’s provisions were either directly copied or adapted from Directive 2024/1203. This applies to the definition of key terms such as ‘ecosystem’ just as much as to the structure and content of the 19 substantive offenses covering pollution, waste, industrial installations, ships, natural resources, and biodiversity. The list of offenses signals a significant expansion, both quantitatively as well as qualitatively, in comparison with the 12 offenses mentioned in the 1998 Convention. Moreover, while the 1998 Convention only required five of these 12 offenses to be criminalised and left it to parties whether to impose criminal or administrative sanctions for the other seven, all 19 offenses included in the 2025 version are unequivocally criminal in character.
The Convention’s contextual thresholds, requiring criminal conduct to be both unlawful and intentional, are also borrowed from Directive 2024/1203 – although the latter is more ambitious in subtle, but important ways. In relation to unlawfulness, the Directive’s Article 3(1) interprets this term broadly to extend not only to flagrant infringements of relevant laws, regulations, and administrative decisions, but also to cases where conduct is in adherence with authorisations that were obtained ‘fraudulently or by corruption, extortion or coercion, or if such authorisation is in manifest breach of relevant substantive legal requirements.’ As Michael Faure has argued, this latter notion of a ‘manifest breach of substantive legal requirements’ is a crucial step forward, for it separates the criminal prohibition from administrative rules and affords the environment a more autonomous standing in criminal law.
Yet, precisely this phrase has been eliminated in the Convention in what must be read as a lamentable effort to reassert the absolute primacy of administrative law in environmental policy. This choice is not only out of touch with the realities on the ground, in which much environmental damage is committed lawfully with the blessing of administrative agencies captured by corporate interests. It also marks a retrogression vis-à-vis the 1998 Convention, which lifted the unlawfulness requirement for pollution crimes that caused death or serious injury to a person or created a significant risk of doing so (Article 2(1)(a)).
As regards the mental element, though generally requiring intentionality, Directive 2024/1203 sets a lower threshold of ‘at least serious negligence’ where the environmental offense in question causes the death of, or serious injury to, persons, substantial damage or a considerable risk of substantial damage to the environment (Article 3(4)). Again, this alternative lower threshold is missing entirely in the 2025 Convention, whereas the 1998 Convention expressly provided for negligence, or alternatively gross negligence, as the appropriate mens rea standard for a number of offenses (Article 3).
Beyond redefining the scope of criminal liability, one of the Convention’s core innovations – and a key improvement vis-à-vis its predecessor – lies in its subsidiary provisions. Here, too, the influence of Directive 2024/1203 is clearly visible. Even before listing the substantive offenses, the Convention sets out detailed obligations in relation to cooperation, coordination, and prevention on environmental crime (Articles 5–11). For instance, parties are required to establish and publish a national strategy on environmental crime, allocate appropriate financial and human resources, adequately train professionals, collect and publish statistical data, and consider establishing specialised judicial and prosecutorial units. Moreover, the Convention insists on corporate liability (Article 34), lays down concrete standards for sanctions (Article 35), considers aggravating circumstances to be taken into account when sentencing (Article 36), obliges states to cooperate ‘to the widest extent possible’ (Article 49).
Another strength is the extent to which the Convention involves and considers a wider variety of stakeholders. In terms of prevention, for instance, it demands that parties engage in awareness-raising and involve civil society and non-governmental organisations in this endeavour, where appropriate (Articles 10–11). Articles 43–45, in turn, provide in great detail for the protection of victims, witnesses, and whistleblowers.
Though less eye-catching than the introduction of new offenses, such procedural and institutional reforms offer a welcome and much-needed framework to strengthen environmental criminal justice across borders. As evaluations of Directive 2008/99 have shown, the low rates of prosecution and conviction experienced thus far are not so much owed to a lack of legal tools as they are to a lack of resources, collaboration, and awareness. This is where the Convention’s greatest contribution may reside.
Ecocide, Strasbourg Style?
Even though the Convention rehauls the entire system of environmental criminal law in Europe, much of the commentary has focused on its contribution to the criminalisation of ecocide. To some extent, this focus is understandable – the CoE itself has advertised the Convention as criminalising ‘conduct resulting in environmental disasters tantamount to ecocide.’
What the CoE and others refer to in particular is Article 31 of the Convention, which establishes a ‘particularly serious offense’ that is complementary to any of the preceding 19 offenses and applies where such offense ‘causes destruction or causes irreversible, widespread and substantial damage, or causes long-lasting, widespread and substantial damage to an ecosystem of considerable size or environmental value, or to a habitat within a protected site, or to the quality of air, soil or water’.
This provision, too, was inspired by the ‘qualified criminal offense’ in Article 3(3) of Directive 2024/1203, something that ecocide advocates had ardently fought for in the negotiation process. Indeed, the Convention’s explanatory report makes clear that Article 31 refers to ‘conduct comparable to “ecocide”, which is already covered by the law of certain States, including some member States to the Council of Europe, and which is being discussed in international fora.’ Moreover, the threshold of ‘long-lasting, widespread, and substantial damage’ resonates with the ‘severe and either widespread or long-term damage’ formulation used by the Stop Ecocide campaign and featured in Vanuatu’s amendment proposal.
Still, the final version of Article 31 remains a far cry from the vision of ecocide as an autonomous environmental crime under international law as promoted by its proponents. For starters, the provision is not labelled ecocide by the Convention itself (though the CoE’s website curiously does call it that), it is only likened to ecocide in the explanatory report. In fact, the word ecocide is only mentioned once in the Convention text – in the preamble, when referring to the Parliamentary Assembly’s repeated (and futile) exhortations for the drafters to consider the notion of ecocide in more detail.
Article 31 is also not an independent crime. In order for the ‘particularly serious offense’ to apply, one or multiple of the 19 primary offenses must be satisfied, in addition to the subsidiary damage threshold in Article 31. That also means that the conduct in question must be both unlawful and intentional. Acts that were carried out in conformity with a valid authorisation are thereby exempted from criminal liability – even where such acts cause destruction or irreversible, widespread and substantial damage. This is a particularly disappointing outcome, since it suggests that administrative approval can legitimise (or at least exempt from criminal liability) even the most atrocious forms of environmental destruction.
As a side note, the drafting of the damage threshold in Article 31 is sloppy, since there are not one, but three distinct thresholds mentioned – ‘destruction,’ ‘irreversible, widespread and substantial damage,’ or ‘long-lasting, widespread and substantial damage’. The relationship between them is highly unclear, and none of these terms are defined anywhere in the Convention or the explanatory report.
The biggest disappointment concerns the consequences of qualifying conduct as a ‘particularly serious offense’, however. Simply put, there are none. Whereas Directive 2024/1203 at least mentions that qualified criminal offenses ‘should be punished with more severe penalties’, the Convention’s explanatory report outright admits that Article 31 ‘does not require the Parties to provide for a particular level of penalties’. Instead, we are told that ‘the drafters opted for the title “particularly serious offence” to clearly highlight that the conduct defined in Article 31 is to be considered particularly serious.’ So much for legal symbolism.
In what concerns ecocide, then, the Convention is a significant step back from the already limited achievements of the EU Directive. This is not an accident but a clear political choice, since the ecocide campaign and the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly had both lobbied hard to include more ambitious language on this front.
Rethinking Environmental Criminal Law
Ultimately, it would be misleading to evaluate the Convention exclusively against the backdrop of the headline-grabbing ecocide debate. The tectonic shifts underway in European environmental criminal law may have been partially sparked by ecocide advocacy, but they stretch far beyond the creation of new offenses. Institutional adjustments such as improved collaboration, victim protection, and dedicated resource allocation may be a lot more meaningful for prosecutorial and judicial practice. The Convention’s drafters clearly embraced a preference for pragmatic reforms over legal symbolism.
Going forward, much will depend on the Convention’s entry into force, which requires ten ratifications. On the one hand, this may seem like a rather steep number, given that the 1998 Convention failed to meet the threshold of three ratifications. On the other hand, the costs of ratification are relatively low for the 27 EU member states, which are anyways required to transpose Directive 2024/1203 into national law by May 2026. To sweeten the deal, the EU Commission further negotiated a special clause in Article 51(2) of the Convention, stipulating that ‘Parties which are member States of the European Union shall, in their mutual relations, apply European Union rules governing the matters within the scope of this Convention.’
Regardless of its eventual political success, the Convention illustrates how the formerly niche field of environmental criminal justice is expanding and changing rapidly in response to a general lack of environmental accountability. It is high time for scholars to look behind the ecocide headlines and pay closer attention to these larger transformations.
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