Big gap in law: Prosecute individuals for ecocide!

Internationally known enviromental lawyer Stephen Donziger won a legal trial against oil company Chevron in 2018.  Chevron was condemned to pay 9.5 billion USD as reparations to 30,000 farmers and indigenous people who suffered enviromental damage and health problems because of oil drilling in Ecuador. As a consequence, Chevron prosecuted Donziger for corruption leading to the disbarment  as a lawyer leading to house arrest (993 days)  and prison arrest (45 days). Donziger was released on April 25, 2022. [5].

From experience, Donziger’s makes 4 legal demands to stop ecocide [1]:

1) Make ecocide an international crime

2) Enact the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty

3) End “Strategic lawsuits against public participation” (SLAPP) lawsuits  and other legal retaliation

4) Protect the Amazon headwaters

5) Binding climate reparations

Importantly,  he demands to prosecute individual decision-makers who are responsible for ecocide [1,2]:

So basically, if you look at the whole panoply of the law, human rights law, environmental law, it has a big gaping hole that an ecocide law would, in my opinion, fill, which is it doesn’t really hold the individuals who make the decisions to pollute, like the oil company executives, and a case I’ve worked on for many years, the Chevron executives, they’re not held accountable, they’re not indicted. Basically, lawsuits are against the company and the people who are the decision makers causing this destruction through these companies get off scot-free.

References:

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/22/five-legal-ideas-fight-climate-crisis-save-planet

[2] https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/1596724919253012481

[3] https://mariannewilliamson.substack.com/p/taking-on-the-fossil-fuel-industry

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger

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