The International Criminal Court has clarified that its remit includes land grabbing and environmental destruction, in a move hailed by campaigners as bringing an end to he age of impunity'.
Company executives and politicians could now be held liable for crimes linked to land grabbing and environmental destruction, the court said yesterday, in a paper clarifying how it selected cases.
According to campaign organisation Global Witness, which has been calling for the ICC to take on such cases, more than three people a week in 2015 were murdered defending their land from theft and destructive industries, the deadliest year on record.
Conflicts over mining were the biggest cause of killings, followed by agri-business, hydroelectric dams and logging, Global Witness said.
‘Chasing communities off their land and trashing the environment has become an accepted way of doing business in many resource-rich, yet cash-poor countries,’ said executive director Gillian Caldwell.
Company bosses and politicians complicit in the violent seizure of land, razing of tropical forests or poisoning water sources could stand trial in the Hague alongside those accused of war crimes and undemocratic rule, she added.
The organisation believes the threat of investigation by the ICC could reshape how business is done in developing countries.
Since its creation in 2002, the ICC has traditionally focused almost exclusively on crimes committed during armed conflict, such as crimes against humanity or war crimes. This left it with a ‘significant blind spot’, since it was not investigating atrocities committed during peacetime, campaigners had argued.
The court can investigate crimes resulting in the illegal dispossession of land, illegal exploitation of natural resources and the destruction of the environment, the court's prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in the paper.
Ludwig Krämer, senior lawyer at ClientEarth, said that ICC can already investigate cases of land grabbing and environmental destruction if it judges them serious enough to have resulted in a crime against humanity. However, he knew of no such cases that had been investigated by the court.
The ICC is due to decide whether to investigate a case related to land seizures and human rights abuses in Cambodia. The case was filed in 2014 by Richard Rogers, an international human rights lawyer at law firm Global Diligence. The case implicates business leaders and the country’s government in illegal land seizures, which forced the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians.
Rogers said that any company considering investing in countries such as Cambodia, Colombia and Brazil, where illegal seizures of land from local people are common, needed to conduct enhanced due diligence on companies in its supply chain. ‘Otherwise they may find themselves complicit in human rights violations or crimes against humanity,’ he warned.
Industries where land grabbing had occurred include rubber and mining, he said. Typically, a company would bribe the government of a country containing the land it wanted, who would then order police to throw communities off their land, he explained. The local environment could also be destroyed in such cases, he added.
The ICC’s paper was a ‘game changer’ and sent a clear message that if the impact of land grabbing was of sufficient gravity, it would intervene, he said. ‘Previously the ICC concentrated on cases relating to armed conflict. This is the first time an international court has said that these crimes are a priority to them. It’s a recognition that this is one of the biggest human rights issues of our age,’ he said.
Global Witness is also calling for new EU laws to prevent European investors from financing land grabs abroad, as well as for international regulations to ensure that companies are legally obliged to respect land rights.
‘National governments and legislators should now follow suit. Land rights must be strengthened in countries that sell land, and respected by the companies that invest in it. A far stronger legal architecture is required internationally to bring an end to the human suffering and environmental cost of the global trade in land,’ Caldwell said.
This article was amended on 21 September to clarify that the ICC's paper clarified an existing position rather than expanding its remit.
