Is it time for “ecocide” to become an international crime?

AT THE NUREMBERG trials, which began on November 20th 1945, allied forces prosecuted leading Nazis for atrocities committed during the Holocaust and the second world war. Among the charges against them was something which, just four years earlier, Winston Churchill had called “a crime without a name”: genocide, the deliberate destruction of a group of people. The term, and a convention against it, was then formally adopted by the United Nations. Half a century later it became one of just four crimes punishable by the International Criminal Court (along with crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression). Now, there is a push to name another concept as an international crime—destruction of ecosystems and the environment, also known as “ecocide”.