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Will Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam make ecocide an international crime? [1]
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Date: 2023-07
When seismic data emerged that the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine may have been blown up on 6 June, a former Ukrainian minister warned that the breach could be Ukraine’s “worst ecological disaster since the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown”.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyi initially condemned the dam’s destruction as an act of Russian terrorism on Twitter – but has since characterised it as a “crime of ecocide”.
Ukraine is one of the few countries to recognise ecocide as a crime under its domestic law. Interestingly, so does Russia, which has recognised ecological crimes since the introduction of a new criminal code in 1996. Under Article 441 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, ecocide is the “mass destruction of flora or fauna, pollution of atmosphere or water resources, as well as committing other actions that can cause an environmental catastrophe”. The offence is punishable by “imprisonment for a term of eight to 15 years”.
Without such a law, Ukraine would be unable to prosecute environmental damage as ecocide. Indeed, legal recognition of ecocide has made it possible for Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General to begin urgent investigations into the dam’s destruction as a possible case of ecocide. It has also enabled Ukraine to investigate broader environmental damage resulting from Russia’s invasion.
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This ongoing probe, which involves teams of Ukrainian scientists, conservationists, bureaucrats and lawyers, has been described by some commentators as “the most detailed wartime tally of environmental destruction ever undertaken”.
But Ukraine has also been highlighting something else: the need for a greater international focus on ecocide. When Zelenskyi first announced his ten-point peace plan to world leaders at the G20 summit in Indonesia last November, ecocide and protection of the environment featured.
Ukraine’s championing of the criminalisation of ecocide can be seen as a conscious attempt to project an international image of an environmentally conscious state. But it must also be laid alongside historical global efforts to have ecocide recognised as an international crime. These efforts have come to the fore with greater intensity in recent times.
Coinage and currency
Diplomats, scientists and lawyers have long tried to push for ecocide’s recognition as an international crime, inspired by what Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin managed with the term ‘genocide’. Lemkin coined the term in 1944 by combining the Greek word genos (meaning race) with the Latin suffix -cide (to kill). He subsequently persuaded states to recognise genocide as an international crime through its codification, four years later, in the Genocide Convention.
Similar attempts began for ecocide in the 1970s, shortly after the term was coined by Arthur W. Galston, a professor of biology at Yale University. It was meant to describe the general feeling of outrage against the US’s destruction of Vietnam’s natural environment by chemical defoliants and herbicides during the Vietnam War. But the attempts to make ecocide an internationally recognised offence were unsuccessful, attributable in part to broader Cold War politics and power dynamics. In the ensuing decades, therefore, not only did ecocide remain a term devoid of legal significance, but global interest in its criminalisation also waned.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-war-kakhovka-dam-ecocide-international-law/
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