In April, Parliament created an offence new to our law: ecocide. This significant step was made through the Anti-Money Laundering, Combatting the Financing of Terrorism and Countering Proliferation Financing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, which, amongst others, amended the Environment Act 2024. With this, Mauritius now belongs to a small, but growing, group of states that treat the gravest destruction of nature as a crime in its own right.

Our law defines ecocide as an unlawful or wanton act committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe, and either widespread or long-term, damage to the environment. A person convicted may face penal servitude of up to ten years, together with orders to restore the damage or to pay compensation for it.

The word ‘ecocide’ is not new. The biologist Arthur Galston coined it in 1970 to describe the destruction caused by the spraying of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. He framed it as a companion concept to genocide: just as the law had come to punish the deliberate destruction of a people, it should punish the deliberate destruction of the environment in which a people lives. At the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, the idea entered international debate. Yet when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was negotiated in the 1990s, ecocide was left out.

The concept has been revived over the past decade. In 2021, an independent panel of jurists led by Philippe Sands, King’s Counsel, proposed the legal definition that Mauritius has now adopted almost word for word. In 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa formally asked that ecocide be added to the Rome Statute as a fifth international crime, in addition to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression. That proposal remains under consideration, so for now ecocide exists in national law well before it exists in international law.

Where does it belong? In form, it is a criminal offence. But it does not sit neatly within familiar categories. Unlike most crimes, its central concern is not a human victim, but the environment itself. It is best understood as a bridge between environmental law and criminal law, drawing on both without belonging completely to either. It also speaks to human rights. The protection of the environment cannot be separated from the rights to life, to health, and to an adequate standard of living. As the International Court of Justice put it, “the environment is not an abstraction but represents the living space, the quality of life, and the very health of human beings, including generations unborn”. Recognising ecocide gives affected communities a route to redress when that living space is destroyed.

The concept carries real difficulties. The thresholds of severe, widespread, and long-term harm must each be proven. The offence reaches individuals rather than companies directly, and knowledge of likely harm can be hard to establish. For Mauritius, the timing is telling. As the forthcoming Constitutional Review Commission considers how the rights of Nature might be written into the Constitution, the new offence shows the law already beginning to speak for the environment.

When the MV Wakashio broke apart off Pointe-d’Esny in 2020, close to 1,000 tonnes of fuel oil reached a protected lagoon. Yet only the captain and first officer were charged, and under maritime law. Although civil proceedings against the relevant companies continue to be contested, criminal responsibility remains limited in scope. As former magistrate Valentine Mayer has observed in l’express, ecocide would shift the law’s focus from the narrow circle of sailors towards the executives, investors, and officials whose decisions shape such disasters. That picture is confirmed by Marcos Orellana, the UN Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, whose report on Mauritius found that the spill left unresolved questions of accountability and remedy. Had ecocide existed as an offence in 2020, those questions need not have sunk with the ship.