- Details
- Hits: 6930
11th October 2011
On the 30th September 2011, the CEO’s of two British oil companies were found guilty of Ecocide at the Supreme Court in Westminster. However, the trial was a mock one, organised by environmental rights lawyer, barrister and author Polly Higgins, in which she could test the robustness of her concept called Ecocide, a proposed legal mechanism to halt the destruction of the planet.
But this facinating event took a bold new step towards making the individuals responsible for crimes against humanity, nature and future generations accountable for their actions.
The prosecution, the defence, the judge, the jury, and the expert witnessess were made up of real people giving their time for free. Only the defendants, played by actors, and the oil companies were fictional. The indictments were based on recent real-life environmental events.
If properly enshrined into International Law under the Rome Statute (2002), Ecocide would become the fifth crime against the peace of the planet. The four existing international crimes against peace are; Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Crimes of Aggression.
The indictment against the first defendant was in relation to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where 250 million gallons of crude oil poured into the deep ocean creating a “dead zone” some 200 square km, killing and oiling birds, and damaging the pristine mangrove swamps in the Mississippi Delta. The leak was not capped for four months.