In the night from Thursday March 18 to Friday 19, 2021, commission deputies voted for the creation of a new "ecocide offense".
For the record, back to November 2020, Minister of Ecological Transition Barbara Pompili and Attorney General Eric Dupond-Moretti said an “ecocide offense” will be created by the French government. In concrete words, this new offense aims at punishing actions causing serious harm to the environment, and punishing polluters then.
“We will create a general pollution offense. Charges will be adjusted to the offender’s willfulness. Penalties incurred include three years’ imprisonment to ten years’ imprisonment depending on criminal recklessness, deliberately infringement of an obligation, and the harshest, intentional crime” Eric Dupond-Moretti told JDD.
As for environment advocates, this announcement sounded underwhelming. We must say that the creation of this “ecocide offense” follows the proposition of the Citizens Convention for Climate that called for an “ecocide crime”. As for Council of State jurists, they condemned the risk of unconstitutionality of this measure found confusing.
"Ecocide offenses invole the most serious harms to the environment on the domestic level", Minister of Ecological Transition Pompili claimed during the commission.
