Tackling environmental crime is an international priority, as stated by many individual nations and by multinational organizations such as Europol. Quantifiable evidence to highlight efforts to address environmental crimes, however, remains scant. We use Interpol Red Notices, a global enforcement tool used to apprehend criminals, including environmental criminals, to examine how environmental crime is represented in this database. Notwithstanding the fact that these Notices have evidenced utility in apprehending environmental criminals, we find low application of this tool in apprehension of these criminals, with only 21 Red Notices of a sample of 4,464 (of the 7,010 active Notices) published as of 3 December 2023 being for catagorized as for environmental crimes. We argue this may indicate gaps or weaknesses in environmental enforcement pathways, and suggest that barriers to use of global enforcement tools should be addressed.

Legal scholarship in the realm of international economic law has a blind spot: the practice of international trade. Cargo and container shipping is the blood and guts of international trade, and it is fuelled by bunker oil – a hydrocarbon mixture of the dirtiest petroleum-based products. Worryingly, there is empirical evidence of bunkers being intentionally contaminated with waste oils. This fraudulent contamination violates numerous international, national, and EU rules on waste management and poses immense risks to the health of planet and people alike. These same acts of fraud are also extremely profitable, and they facilitate the smooth functioning of our global economy. The fraud is itself not just incentivised in the tight-margins reality of international trade, but it is facilitated by the lack of proper legislation and the vulnerability of the existing means of enforcement in the areas where there is legislation to comply with. Economic operators often use falsified documents to market fuel oil that should be considered as waste. Systematic wrongdoing of this kind is detrimental to the environment and risks eroding the rule of law in both its formal and substantive conceptualisations.

Cette réflexion se propose d’analyser le texte du projet d’amendements du Statut de Rome visant à inclure dans le champ matériel de la Cour pénale internationale (CPI) un crime d’écocide. Conçu sous l’égide d’une organisation non gouvernementale réunissant douze spécialistes-praticiens du droit international de l’environnement et du droit international pénal, ce texte vient marquer les bases d’une définition juridique d’un crime écologique autonome. S’inscrivant dans la dynamique d’incrimination des dommages gravement attentatoires à l’environnement, cette démarche de caractérisation remonte dans la brume grisâtre d’un passé un tout petit peu lointain. L’on relèvera à cet effet que l’opération Ranch Hand au Vietnam constitue l’un des repères structurant l’urgence de criminaliser les actes graves d’atteinte écologique. C’est dans cette perspective que les travaux de la Commission du droit international sur la codification des crimes contre la paix et la sécurité de l’humanité soulignent l’intérêt d’incriminer aussi bien les dommages écologiques perpétrés en temps de paix que dans le contexte de belligérance. Le Statut de Rome s’étant limité, dans sa conception originale, aux seuls dommages écologiques perpétrés en temps de guerre, ce projet d’amendements du Statut de Rome rend compte de l’intérêt de prendre en charge notamment les milliers d’atteintes écologiques émanant, en temps normal, des multinationales et des criminels maffieux, à travers une incrimination autonome consacrant l’écocide comme cinquième crime contre la paix et la sécurité de l’humanité. Force est de souligner que cette proposition de révision vient rééquilibrer les fondements épistémologiques d’une convention par excellence anthropocentrique en lui assignant une bonne dose d’éco-centrisme. C’est donc l’occasion de souligner qu’ayant été assumé par le Vanuatu à l’occasion de la 20ème session de l’Assemblée générale des États-parties du Statut de Rome, ce texte constitue la base sur laquelle repose cette révision conventionnelle. Il appartiendra aux États-parties au texte instituant la CPI de se l’approprier à travers leur implication dans le processus de révision.

Pesticides are chemicals used to kill pests and other “rival” organisms which may cause damage to crops in agriculture. In some instances the vast usage of pesticides may create negative effects on the environment and its units like living and non-living organisms. Green criminology counts such harmful activities upon the environment as crimes or harms though such activities can be legal or illegal in nature. The case of the endosulfan disaster that occurred in Kasargod, Kerala can be accounted to environmental harms which detrimentally affected the environment and its units, especially humans. The pesticide endosulfan was sprayed aerially for around 25 years in cashew plantations situated in Kasargod and caused severe diseases and extensive malformations among people living in the region. In this paper the endosulfan disaster of Kasargod is approached through the green criminological perspective of environmental harms.