Addressing Ecocide: Quaker Contributions

Participants will gain crucial information about what is involved in amending the Rome Statute to make ecocide the fifth crime against peace. We will explore how this could help to prevent multinational companies and reckless governments from causing environmental destruction. We will also discuss how this can complement Quaker initiatives on climate justice and explore how Quakers can make a distinctive contribution to the Stop Ecocide campaign.

We will cover:
• Why ecocide is “the missing law’’
• The Independent Expert Panel’s definition of ecocide and the international response;
• The process for amending the Rome Statute to include ecocide;
• Why the amendment hasn’t been tabled yet, and how this could become law;
• Limitations and possibilities for legal action in states which have not ratified the Rome Statute;
• How this could protect nature by preventing environmental damage before it happens;
• Implementing ecocide in domestic law;
• Ecocide as a war crime.

We will invite discussion around these topics:
• Whether an ecocide law would conflict with the Quaker commitment to restorative justice and concerns about criminal justice?
• If restorative justice is used in ecocide cases, what might that involve?
• Could Quakers make a distinctive contribution by calling for restorative justice to be the first response to consider in cases of ecocide?

Session 1:
In the first part of this online learning space (each part lasting two hours), we will be joined by:
• Sue Miller, Head of Global Networks for Stop Ecocide International.
• Marian Liebmann who has worked on restorative justice for 40 years.
• Hezron Masitsa, Justice and Peace Secretary for Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC World Office) and coordinator of the Global Quaker Sustainability Network.

A presentation on Ecocide will be followed by plenty of space for questions and answers, and a discussion on how restorative justice might be used in this context.

There will be participatory, exploratory activities to ignite our curiosity and illuminate where we may wish to educate ourselves further.

Resources: Resources for reflection and further learning will be provided in-between sessions. This is an optional extra for a deeper dive, the sessions will stand alone without the additional reading.

Session 2:
After a period of reflection between sessions, we will reconvene for a more practical discussion exploring what’s possible, what’s difficult, and what’s worth pushing for. We will also include the voices of speakers from Africa working on these issues:
• James Gondi – Africa High Level Coordinator at Stop Ecocide International.
• Bainito Wamalwa – FWCC Africa Section.

There will be space for small-group and whole-group discussions focussing on participants’ concerns about environmental destruction, how an ecocide law might work in practice and how Quakers might be involved.

We hope that friends will be able to take this into their communities after the course, to share the issues and discern further actions.

Make sure to check the times in your own timezone at https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

This course is part of a series exploring re-visioning, click here to discover other courses in this series.