Ecocide Explainer Video

EARTH LAW

Exhibition and microsite

Earth Law was an exhibition and microsite developed and produced by INTERPRT in collaboration with Polly Higgins and Ecological Defence Integrity (now Stop Ecocide International). The exhibition was held in conjunction with the 17th Assembly of State Parties (ASP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and hosted by Museon, museum for science and culture in The Hague and the launch of the concept for a novel test case on ecocide conceived by Polly Higgins. Earth Law consisted of a series of panels on ecocide law, integrated with multimedia works, including a 10-minute animation visualizing the impacts of climate emergency in the Pacific Ocean. The microsite (now archived) mirrored the exhibition with text by Higgins.

Ecocide Law Timeline

For the 2018 Dhaka Art Summit and traveling exhibition, we created a timeline of the history of ecocide law from the 1970s when the term was coined in response to the Vietnam war through the 1990s (the signing of the Rome Statute) and to the 2010s when ecocide law would be revived led by Polly Higgins, among others. 

Case 1307

In 1947, as part of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), Poland listed eleven German administrators and foresters as war criminals for the devastation of Polish forests. Case no. 1307, as it was filed with the UNWCC, sets one of the earliest precedents of criminal charges for environmental destruction and for ecocide law.

Exhibition

Race and Forest’, INTERPRT’s exhibition for the first time reconstructs case no. 1307 and looks at how forests were used to hide the evidence of mass murder in Chelmno – Nazi Germany’s first extermination camp – using original documents, photographs, diagrams, drawings, and text drawn from the archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Polish National Archives with visual and cartographic evidence and digital 3-D representations.

ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE

Poster Series

INTERPRT developed a poster series on the history of ecocide law for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in three sections: precedents of prosecution in International Criminal Law, attempts to codify environmental destruction as a stand-alone crime at the UN, and civil society efforts for the recognition of ecocide as a fifth international crime from the 1970s to the present. The posters were printed and distributed to cultural institutions across Poland.

Red Mud

From 1967 to 2015, ALTEO-Rio dumped more than 30 million tons of toxic red mud into the Mediterranean sea.. INTERPRT produced an evidence file for the ecocide moot court organized by Wild Legal that took place on 26 June, 2021. It was set to challenge existing environment protection laws and whether these actions could constitute a major case of ecocide in French law. Our visual investigation focused on the Cassidaigne canyon in the Calanques National Park, where the red mud is discharged at a depth of 324 meters, covering a 900 square km wide area on the seabed. We synthesized publicly available environmental data into a seamless 3D model of the canyon and a multimedia presentation.

Ecocide Trial