(Photo by Trey Ratcliff via Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
On September 9th, 2024, the governments of Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa stood before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. They urged the world to acknowledge a new kind of crime: “Ecocide.” As nations facing intensifying environmental collapse, they proposed amending the Rome Statute, Court’s jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression, to include mass environmental destruction as an international crime.
Ecocide, which they define as the severe and widespread harm to ecosystems and communities, would be listed alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression.
A Legal Fight for the Right to Exist
This bold move by three Pacific Island nations comes as the climate crisis accelerates globally, with climate-linked disasters tripling in the Pacific over the past decade. Their proposal follows a growing trend where climate-vulnerable nations are stepping up to fill the void left by global inaction. Unlike wealthier countries, which often outsource emissions and evade binding climate laws, the Pacific Islands are calling for a binding legal mechanism to hold polluters accountable. Their demand for ecocide as a fifth international crime reframes the conversation about who controls international law, whose voice it prioritizes, and what values it should protect.
The term “ecocide” has steadily gained traction across legal and activist communities. Environmental lawyers, Indigenous leaders, and youth activists have joined forces to argue that deliberate environmental destruction deserves the same levels of gravity and enforcement as other international crimes. What sets the Pacific Islands’ approach apart is not only its urgency but its moral clarity: they are not positioning themselves as passive victims of climate change but as proactive leaders pushing for structural change.
By situating environmental harm as a human rights and survival issue, the Pacific initiative elevates the debate on global environmental governance. The proposal does more than spotlight environmental devastation; it spotlights the persistent structural inequalities that allow environmental destruction to persist unchecked. Through this case, some valuable questions are raised, including: why the ecocide proposal marks a historic turning point, how it challenges entrenched legal frameworks, and what it reveals about the future of international justice when led by those most affected.
A Crime Without a Name
The Rome Statute, established in 1998 by the ICC, defined the crimes the international community agreed were most severe: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. Despite early discussions, environmental destruction did not make it into the final document. Behind this exclusion lay potential and economic interests, particularly from major industrialized nations who feared that an ecocide law could threaten their extraction industries.
That omission carried significant consequences. Without ecocide in international law, communities facing irreversible environmental harm have legal recourse at the global level. The Pacific Islands have borne the brunt of this gap. Kiribati has already lost significant tracts of arable land to rising sea levels. In Fiji, storm surges and intensifying cyclones have devastated communities and infrastructure. In Vanuatu, entire villages have relocated from coastal areas due to saltwater intrusion, which renders traditional lands uninhabitable.
These environmental crises are not only physical; they also carry spiritual and cultural weight. For many Indigenous Pacific communities, land and water are not resources, but living relatives. The destruction of ecosystems is not just a tragedy; it is a form of cultural erasure. Yet, the legal system has failed to recognize this form of violence.
The Rome Statute’s architecture has long centred on political violence and state crimes while excluding slow-onset, transboundary environmental harms. This failure has roots in colonial history. Pacific Islands were sites of nuclear testing, large-scale mining, and logging carried out by foreign powers, namely the U.S., U.K., and France. These activities left legacies of contamination, displacement, and economic dependency. But because their acts were legal at the time, there has been no justice.
The absence of ecocide as a crime in international law has served to protect the powerful while leaving the vulnerable without recourse. The current proposal by Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa challenges that legacy. It represents a demand for international law to evolve to treat environmental destruction not only as a regulatory failure but also as a moral and criminal injustice. These nations are not proposing an abstract principle. They are responding to lived harm, rooted in generations of loss, with a legal vision that centered preservation, equity, and accountability.
Resistance from Power, Challenges in Law
Translating the Pacific Islands’ vision into binding international law requires navigating a complex landscape of resistance. To amend the Rome Statute, at least two-thirds of the ICC member states must support the addition. That threshold alone presents a significant challenge, especially since many influential countries, including the U.S., Russia, China, and India, have expressed reluctance to expand the court’s jurisdiction.
The legal debate around ecocide often focuses on definitions. Critics argue that the terms “severe,” “widespread,” or “long-lasting” remain too vague to be consistently enforced. Others worry that such a law might unfairly target states with developing economies. However, these concerns often serve to delay or dilute necessary action rather than meaningfully engage with the urgency of the issue.
Even if the legal definition becomes widely accepted, the ICC itself has institutional limitations. Its history of selective enforcement, slow proceedings, and limited jurisdiction has led many to question its effectiveness. The court has faced accusations of bias for focusing disproportionately on African nations while failing to address crimes linked to powerful actors in the Global North.
Pacific leaders remain undeterred. Their communities cannot afford to wait for consensus while saltwater claims more land and storms grow more violent. The urgency is rooted in present realities, not abstract legal theory. As Samoa’s representative highlighted during the submissions, the goal is to establish legal obligations before climate-induced collapse becomes irreversible.
Diplomatic resistance from powerful states often reflects a deeper unwillingness to confront the systemic roots of environmental degradation. Large fossil-fuel exporting countries are concerned about setting a precedent. If ecocide becomes prosecutable, multinational corporations could face serious legal risks, and entire economies might be forced to reevaluate their practices. This reality underscores the political tension embedded in the legal fight for this ecocide, namely, that the legal system must confront entrenched economic interests that benefit the status quo.
A Global Momentum for Legal Change
Despite these challenges, the Pacific Islands have built alliances around the world. Legal scholars and human rights organizations across Europe and Latin America have voiced support, with many recognizing that the law must evolve to meet the demands of the ecological emergency. These connections have helped amplify the Pacific voices within global legal conversations and create pathways for the proposal to gain traction.
The risk of symbolic justice in creating laws that sound transformative but lack effective enforcement remains real. However, the Pacific Islands’ proposal insists that justice cannot remain aspirational. If international institutions claim to represent the rule of law, they must expand their scope to include environmental survival. Otherwise, the very legitimacy of these systems will continue to erode.
The Future of Global Justice, Reimagined from the Pacific
The Pacific Islands’ proposal to criminalize ecocide signals more than a new legal category; it repositions the margins as the moral center of international law. This shift forces a reckoning with the history of global legal frameworks that have long ignored or marginalized environmental harm, especially when it affects less powerful nations.
When Pacific leaders draw comparisons between ecocide and genocide, they frame mass ecological destruction as an intentional action with systemic roots. They highlight how environmental collapse, like mass violence, disproportionately affects already vulnerable communities to confront environmental destruction not as an inevitable outcome of development, but as a consequence of unchecked industrial exploitation and legal impunity.
By introducing ecocide into legal discourse, these nations not only challenge legal traditions but also offer an alternative ethic. In the Pacific, environmental well-being is deeply interwoven with cultural identity and communal life. The destruction of a forest, reef, or coastline is not simply a loss of biodiversity; it is the loss of language, spirituality, and history. By calling on the ICC to protect these landscapes, the Pacific Islands are effectively asserting that environmental justice is cultural justice.
The Pacific Islands add a collective voice which is rooted in shared geography, shared loss, and shared vision. They demonstrate that climate-vulnerable nations can lead, legislate, and redefine the contours of justice. In doing so, they provide a model not only for environmental governance but for global leadership grounded in solidarity and survival. Their proposal is a blueprint for what international law could become: a system not solely for managing conflict, but also for protecting life in all its interconnected forms.
A Crime Whose Time Has Come
The Pacific Islands’ ecocide proposal offers more than a legal innovation, but it is a moral compass in an age of ecological collapse. This initiative challenges the inertia of existing legal frameworks that continue to prioritise economic stability over environmental survival. It places frontline communities not just at the center of international concern but at the forefront of international leadership.
Recognition of ecocide as a crime would transform the meaning of accountability in the 21st century. It would ensure that corporations and states face consequences for actions that irreversibly damage ecosystems. It would empower vulnerable nations to seek justice not only for past harm but to deter future violations. Most importantly, it would signal a profound shift in how the international community values life; not only human life, but also the ecological systems that sustain it.
If the Rome Statute is amended, the effects could be tangible in the Pacific Islands. Legal tools could be used to demand reparations, push for climate adaptation financing, and ensure that environmental protections are no longer negotiable. Acknowledging ecocide would also help strengthen Indigenous rights by legally recognizing the value of land and water beyond their economic utility.
Even if the statute is not amended immediately, the proposal has already reframed the conversation. It reminds us that laws are not static, but evolve when the people most affected demand change. Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa are doing just that. They are transforming grief into policy, tradition into law, and vulnerability into vision.
Their proposal stands as a test: Will the world respond with action or empty rhetoric? The answer will not only define the legitimacy of international law but also shape the kind of world future generations will inherit. Justice must begin at the water’s edge, where the land is disappearing but voices are rising. The Pacific Islands had drawn a clear line in the sand. Now, the rest of the world must choose whether to stand with them.
Edited by Chelsea Bean
