Greening the International Criminal Court: A Critical Inquiry into Environmental Liability under the Rome Statute

Abstract

Human-induced environmental decline poses an existential threat to the peace, security, and well-being of the world. This crisis has intensified calls for the international legal system to assume a more proactive role in confronting the causes of environmental degradation. In this context, the International Criminal Court (ICC), grounded in its mandate over the most serious crimes of concern to the international community, has emerged as a potential forum for imposing accountability on the political, commercial, and military authors of environmental destruction. Despite the exigency of the situation, international criminal law lacks a substantive legal framework that is properly calibrated to address environmental harms. Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute directly addresses wartime environmental damage, but conditions liability on exacting thresholds of damage and disproportionality such that it offers little, if any, protection to environmental interests. During peacetime, international criminal law recognises environmental harm only insofar as it is incidental to a humanitarian atrocity, but not as an independent concern. Framing environmental liability through this anthropocentric lens not only neglects the full extent of environmental destruction from a wide range of human practices but also embeds the reductive normative position that environmental concerns are marginal to human interests. Recognising that human and environmental interests are interdependent, this article argues that effective protection relies on a mechanism of environmental liability divorced from anthropocentric constraints.