A Missing Crime? An Exploration of the Proposed Criminalisation of Ecocide in Catalonia

Abstract

This paper explores proposals to reconceptualise environmental law by adopting a legal definition of ecocide in Catalonia. Through a narrative review, there is a tendency of articles that emerged in the 2010s to advocate for ecocide, being the missing 5th crime against peace, tracing back its origins to previous legal conventions. However, as the ‘Stop Ecocide’ campaign has gained more traction, and especially since the release of the ‘Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide’ (IEP), there are arguments for decreasing expectations surrounding ecocide and critique regarding its intrinsic evaluation as well as other socio-legal issues. This paper seeks to address some of this critique while still exploring how environmental law, through measures such as ecocide, can be integrated into a regional context, such as the amendment to law 10/ 1995 in the Spanish Penal Code, as proposed in the Catalan Parliament. However, there has been a shift in the ‘Stop Ecocide’ campaign, and Spain as a member state needs to ratify the new EU directive 2024/1203 that ‘encompasses crimes similar to ecocide’. By extension, from the Catalan context, there is a recent initiative on an international scale to ratify ecocide as the ‘fifth crime against peace’ in the Rome Statute as an amendment to ‘Article 8ter’ as proposed by the IEP. The research for the thesis used a methodology informed by semi-structured interviews with experts within environmental and criminal law, from academia, the private sector, and NGOs, as well as document analysis. The findings were analysed thematically by drawing deductively on environmental and ecological justice theories, as well as inductively for other key patterns. The thesis concludes that while the intention of ecocide is not inherently ecocentric, it can provide some of the tools necessary towards a possible reconceptualisation of environmental law crucial to combat the current environmental crisis.