ECOGENOCIDE CRIMES IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

Environmental crimes are among the most important issues that occupy our contemporary world.The need to establish a law aimed at protecting the environment from manifestations of genocide emerged in the seventies of the last century in connection with the practices of the American army during the Vietnam War, if it used herbicides and defoliating chemicals to destroy the leaf cover and crops of enemy forces.Since that time, the voices of civil society organizations and international lawyers have been raised to pass a law criminalizing environmental genocide practices as an independent international crime that falls within the jurisdiction of international courts.This is the basis on which (Polly Higgins) relied when she founded the movement to end environmental genocide in 2010.She intends to implement a bold new law to obstruct the train of destruction that cannot be stopped, as she seeks in establishing this movement to uproot the status quo from its roots and eradicate the culture that allowed the destruction of our environment.In addition, other international efforts have emerged to criminalize environmental destruction, represented by the policy paper submitted by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in 2016, in addition to the jurisprudential efforts that aim to add a crime Ecocide as a fifth crime within the framework of crimes included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court