Taking a break from designing wacky clothes, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood has decided to vocalise her thoughts on the destruction of the environment and is encouraging people to sign a petition which will force EU legislators to consider passing a new EU law.
The campaign, which follows on from an idea by environmental lawyer Polly Higgings and which is now being spearheaded by Prisca Merz, is called "End Ecocide" and aims to get the European Union to recognise ecocide as a fifth international Crime against Peace.
In order for EU legislators to consider the new law, the petition needs at least 1 million signatures; it currently has 100,000 signatures.
Although companies and individuals can be held responsible for a variety of environmental harms, many incidents still do not result in compensation or prosecution, and few executives are ever threatened with prison terms as a result of their failures.
Westwood argues that some companies simply build the risk of being fined into their business models, because the profits outweigh the costs. She wants business executives to be personally liable and to face the possibility of jail time as well as financial penalties, in order to provide a strong disincentive to take risks that could result in environmental damage.
She said, "Our financial rulers and the politicians who help them are playing a giant game of Monopoly with the world’s finite resources. But you can’t play Monopoly when everybody’s dead."
The petition calls on the European Commission "to adopt legislation to prohibit, prevent and pre-empt ecocide – the extensive damage to, destruction of, or loss of ecosystems". It further asks that individuals and companies should be held responsible for committing ecocide, including companies based in the EU that operate in other territories. This would, for example, mean that instances of pollution such as oil spills abroad, or the dumping of toxic waste in the developing world, by European companies would be counted as crimes under any such act.
The draft Directive that the campaign has drawn up includes a broad definition of ecocide, as the "extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants has been severely diminished; and or peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of another territory has been severely diminished."
This could be held to encompass climate change, making companies with high emissions liable, and Westwood suggested that it could even apply to activities such as fracking, which she is strongly against.
Such a broadly sweeping definition is unlikely to make it unscathed into European law, but the campaigners believe that even forcing the European legislative bodies to consider it would be an important victory.
Prisca Merz, director of the End Ecocide in Europe campaign, said, "With this law, we want to shift [people’s] consciousness. By making their destruction a crime, we recognise the intrinsic value of ecosystems for human and non-human life on earth."
For more information, see:
