The Hague art exhibit. Clothing donated by survivors of rape as a weapon of war.
In December of 2025, one month before Trump bombed Caracas and promised oil exploitation that would carry a high environmental cost for Venezuelans and three months after his administration began bombing fishing boats off the Caribbean and Pacific Coasts, and a month before he began, again, to threaten war with Greenland, the International Criminal Court published its Environmental War Crimes Policy initiative. Now the job is to make words deed. What would that mean?
I attended the Third International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in The Hague, the Netherlands, in June 2024, where the initiative and issues around it were discussed. Here are some of my notes and thoughts.
Accountability, Peace and Justice: Advances in Making States and Corporations Accountable for Environmental War Crimes.
Overarching points:
- The Environment should no longer be the silent victim of war.
- War in one nation affects the environment everywhere.
- Environmental war crime definition: mass destruction of flora and fauna, poisoning of air and water resources.
- Accountability can mean criminality and it can mean reconciliation. It is a spectrum.
Maksym Popov, Special Advisor on Environmental Crimes to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, noted that Ukraine is documenting Russian environmental war crimes, with the intent of prosecuting members of the Russian Federation. The UN Charter on Human Rights includes the right to live in a healthy, sustainable environment. Twenty-five % of Ukraine is now contaminated with land mines. A dam was blown up, which flooded whole communities. A nuclear research facility was bombed. Beyond these obvious breaches, they have investigated 207 other crimes of ecocide. They presented their findings in February 2024, with fifty recommendations for accountability, reconstruction, and building a green economy. Twenty-five nations and many international NGOs supported their effort.
Ukraine is the first state to take this action.
Global lessons: They use an App for citizens to capture environmental damage. They worked with many organizations, scientists, and technologists. They hope this case will lead to the deterrence of armed conflicts, and will the nature of war to protect the environment.
My thoughts:
- Ukraine has powerful global support that makes this possible. How do we use this for other cases, current and past, where powerful Global North actors in the US and Europe are responsible for the destruction? Can it be used for Gaza? Yemen? Also, what about the environmental devastation in Russia from Ukraine? Are they fighting in a way that will not destroy the environment?
- Sometimes the destruction is not immediately obvious. In Sweden, we learned of a city in the Arctic where military refuse created by the United States during the Cold War will unleash nuclear waste across the globe. How can these crimes be repaired? Marcus Oreilana, below, addressed this question.
Toxics and Human Rights accountability in Nuclear weapons testing, when crimes happened decades ago.
Marcus Oreilana, UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights (Chile) discussed these Cases:
Algeria, where the French detonated bombs; Kazakhstan, where the Soviets did testing; Australia, who tested in Indigenous regions. People there became blind from a black mist.
In the Marshall Islands, the US, in 1946-8, detonated 67 nuclear bombs. Those tests have had permanent destructive effects, including the passing on of genetic defects, and continued poisoning from toxic soil and water. The UN has found the US guilty of denying gender and cultural rights, according to the UN charter. In 1986, the US admitted culpability, setting up a nuclear claims tribunal fund. The funds were insufficient. Citizens began a petition in 2000. On October 2022, the US provided some technical assistance to address the nuclear legacy in the Marshall Islands.
Case lessons: By preserving the memory of injustice and continued truth-telling, past crimes can be rectified.
In each case, the UN is setting a precedent. In the Marshall Islands, the US argued that statutes of wrongful action did not exist in 1948. Counterargument: the principle of self-determination did exist, and it was violated.
Another recent case of toxicity: the UN determined that the rights of Indigenous people were violated in Paraguay, where a woman brought a case after pesticides killed her husband. In this case, the violators were found guilty but they have continued their poisoning.
Orelliana argued for uncovering historical physical trauma and its legacy. When people speak up and keep telling the truth about their experiences, there might come a time when we have the political space to listen and act. This relates not just to environmental crimes but also to crimes like genocide.
Transitional Justice in Post-Conflict
Mununi Mutuku, Principal Programme Officer, National Cohesion and Integration Commission (Kenya) explained how transitional Justice operates in post-conflict communities.
There are judicial and non-judicial mechanisms for seeking justice for ecocide created by violent conflicts. These include toxic dumping, deforestation, destroying ecosystems like grasslands, land mines, and the destruction of livestock. They are often transboundary ecosystems, affecting territory across borders.
Landscapes are not only physical, but they are also places of memories. Rivers that brought life became waterways that carried dead bodies. They carry history. Transitional Justice has, in the past, focused on people, not the environment. We delinked humans from the environment. Now we are using laws to protect the environment from crimes against it.
If the environment is a victim, we need hearings. We need truth-telling, remediation, and restoration. We need to use Indigenous knowledge to repair. We use educational, judicial, and community-based organizations to find Transitional Justice.
People have brought up cases of landmines; so far, the focus has been solely on human damage, not damage to the environment.
When is it post-conflict? There is no clear definition. Mutuku also talked about how, in the borderlands, people have engaged in transitional justice for centuries. Often, it is states that are unwilling to cooperate.
Environmental Crimes Policy Initiative of the International Criminal Court ICC
Keven Jon Heller, Special Adviser to the Prosecutor on War Crimes, International Criminal Court (ICC), the environmental crimes policy initiative was in draft stages with plans to get it out by the end of 2024. (It came out in December 2025)
Heller noted that environmental crimes are more likely to victimize marginalized people: children, women, Indigenous people, and low-ncome people. The results of these crimes are extermination, deportation, destruction of livelihoods, poisoning, and starvation.
The process will include investigation, charging, and sentencing. They are finding ways to prosecute corporations.
There are limitations: 1. They cannot supersede eco-side. 2. They focus solely on harm to humans. Heller says they need an eco-centric approach. 3.They are understaffed and will never be able to prosecute more than a few crimes. States and civil society need to take the lead. The ICC can support national efforts, and bring people together transnationally..
Heller said something about the king being naked, and that is my biggest takeaway from this plenary. Victims of these environmental crimes already know the crimes committed against them. The international community is slowly starting to listen and consider methods of accountability. The power to prosecute and jail ALL those responsible would result in the upending of governments, corporations, the military industrial complex, and global capitalism.
Den Haag (The Hague)
This essay is part of a series called Aging on the Run. In October 2023, my spouse, David, and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.
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