Armed Conflict, Ecocide and Climate Change at a Crossroad: Some Legal Perspectives

In this article, the rules of Law of State Responsibility, International Environmental, Humanitarian and Criminal Law as well as the law of the European Union and Ukraine concerning the responsibility and liability for widespread, long-lasting and severe damage to the environment are analyzed. The authors consider the perspectives of the criminalization of ecocide in international law and the relevance of global efforts to combat climate change to the armed conflict in Ukraine. The overall purpose of the paper is to link the international community’s actions towards the addition of ecocide as the ‘Fifth Crime’ to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, global efforts in relation to climate change mitigation and accountability, on the one side, and the implementation of the responsibility of the Russian Federation for its aggressive war against Ukrainian sovereignty, territorial integrity, human lives and the natural environment, on the other. The article analyses the concept of state responsibility, individual criminal responsibility and strict liability with regard to environmental damage and crimes with a special emphasis on wartime environmental harm. The authors consider climate change as a crime of ecocide from the perspectives of state, corporate and individual responsibility and study the relevance of these issues to the armed conflict in Ukraine. The article pays a special attention to the idea of drafting the special Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Ecocide.