 500 depend onr, it is far much. It really is a delight to have the opportunity to speak here for a number of reasons. In part to speak to an institute that carries a huge amount of weight and influence being in Sweden and across the world. And often also with institutes of this kind that are dealing with policy to be able to have the opportunity to talk about law that can inform policy. felly mae'n roi amseririedol y byddwch i'w ddweud ar y cysylltu o'r cysyllt yma. Rwy'n dechrau'n ei ddweud, ond byddwn i'n rhanhafym i'w ddweud ei gafodd, ond pethau'r hyn yn bellwch o'r llyfrwysproffol eraill. I'w rhanhau'r llyfrwysproffol yn 2010, ond ond efallai'n brosesion yma yn ym Mhwyaf, a'r rhanhau sydd yn 2010 yn y Llyfrin Llyfridog yn Yng Nghymru, that we create an international crime of ecocide to criminalize mass damage and destruction to the environment. In fact, it goes deeper than that. It's not just criminalizing extensive damage destruction to or loss of ecosystems, but also it's about creating a legal duty of care. And there are two types of ecocide here that was naturally occurring in ecocide, such as rising sea levels, tsunamis, floods and so on so forth, Bydd o'r ddwyf yn ddwyf yn maethau ymweld gyda ei ddweud. Mae'r ddwyf yn cyfrwytoedd cyfrwytoedd. Mae'r ddwyf yn cyfrwytoedd arall. Mae'n ddwyf yn cyfrwytoedd cyfrwytoedd. Mae'r gofyniaeth y Basgatar oes ar gyfrwytoedd. Mae'r ddwyf yn ddwyflol wedi ffaisol i朝ol. Mae'r ddwyf yn ysgrifennu ar y cyfrwytoedd. Mae'r ddwyf yn eu hunain gweld ei ddwyf yn cyfrwytoedd? Mae'r ddwyf yn ddwyf yn cael eu chweithio ar y proses. I had to address myself, because when I first came up with a proposal, I actually didn't know how to put forward a proposal such as this, and what I discovered was that I had a legal nexus, I had, by dint of being a lawyer, I had the ability to submit such a proposal into the United Nations Law Commission, and what I did was I spent three months treating it like a legal brief basically immersing myself in this and drafting it up. To do that, I did as every good lawyer would do, I went back to press principles, I went back to see what would we already have in place as international laws, and actually how can we fast track this, rather than creating a whole new body of law over here, is there a way of actually attaching it to a remending and existing document, and indeed there is. The Rome Statute is a codification document that was put in place in the late 1990s, and the Rome Statute brought together existing international crimes, was adding to it, and also putting in place the International Criminal Court in Hague. Prior to 2002, when it was put in place, we actually didn't have an international criminal court, so what happened was that we set up tribunals that were in essence situational specific, so after World War II we set up the Nuremberg War tribunals, and it was within that that crimes against humanity and genocide, prostitutions were brought under that. So if those doors were closed, then it was a matter of chasing after an event, so we wound up, then there was an independent tribune, and there have been Yugoslavia as well, but it was getting to a point where there was a recognition that actually often it's too little too late, and to put in place something that was a permanent international criminal court. Now, when the Rome Statute has been drafted, over a period of about 11 years, from 1985 to 1996, in fact it wasn't just the inclusion of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, but also there was provision to include not one but two other international crimes. One international crime of aggression, the run up to war, but also of ecocide. Now I didn't know that when I proposed into the United Nations that we were missing a fifth crime, a crime of ecocide, but one of the things that I learned very early on when I proposed this in was that in fact nothing was going to happen unless I took this out into the public domain. It landed in the UN law commissions in file and probably just stayed there, and the greatest opportunity I had was actually to take this out into the public domain, and thanks to the Guardian newspaper in the UK, about a week or so afterwards, they put out a very big article about this proposal, and said to me, Polly, we're going to need a website. We're going to put this out in a week. Can you put a website together in a week? Okay, I can try to do that. And they phoned me the next day and said, actually it's going out today, what's your website? It just so happened I had my website guy with me, and we literally were putting it up as it was going out, and as it was going out online, and this is really the prior of mainstream media, the hits to the website. We had 28,000 hits on that website that weekend, so it attracted a lot of attention very, very fast. And one of the things that it flushed out was a journalist from, I think Estonia actually, from Tannan, who got in touch to say, well, what is your opinion of the fact that ecocide was to become an international crime back in the 1990s? Now this was the first I'd ever known about it, and what he brought forward was a document, a UN document, all UN documents are codified, they all have numbers and so on. And it's a document that referred to another document. So suddenly here opened up a potential paper trail. It was taking me on a journey, but I didn't have access to these documents. And in fact I phoned up the United Nations and said I have a document here, I have a code for it, and when I put it onto the website where you can access UN documents, it comes up as error document unknown. So there's a missing link. And I actually had, it was a very surreal situation, I had someone on the phone saying to me that I'm sorry that's not my responsibility. I said, okay, well, who's this at then? Let me bring you through to this department. And I get someone else saying, yeah, you need to go onto the website. And I've done that. Oh well, broken link, not my responsibility. Well if not you then who? And for two hours I had this conversation until I ended up back. With the same guy that had started the phone call with. Nobody would take responsibility for the broken link on the website. And I thought, you know, this is a little bit like the United Nations itself, who's taking responsibility here. And where is the transparency? But I guess there must be a basement of documents somewhere. And indeed there is. In fact everything is locked in Geneva. But what I required was a lawyer who could go down there who knew his or her way around there and follow the paper trail. And indeed that lawyer materialised, Dr Damian Short, at the University of London, the School of Advanced Studies. And he and a team of students, it just so happened when I was teaching there. And I asked him, did he know anyone who might have access? He said, well yeah, I do. I have special access. I'm actually researching the work of Raphael Lenfkin. He was the lawyer who proposed genocide. And it just so happened that he was about to go down into the basement with a group of students two weeks later. So he went down there. He took the one document reference that we had. And he followed that paper trail between the students. And they came back with two leveraged files. And in fact now we have many leveraged files, far thicker than that. But what that initially showed from just one week's worth of following paper trails was it flushed out a whole load of information that showed that there was in fact a huge history within the United Nations of Ecoside Law. And it started in this country amazingly. All of Palmer berated the United Nations for dragging their feet in the UN stockpile conference back in 1972. And it was at that conference then that a working group on crimes against the environment, ad hoc working group on students, was formally put in place. And the following year a convention, a draft convention on Ecoside Law, was submitted into the United Nations. Traveling through time up until 1985 was when then the decision to put together a codification document for the offences of most serious concern to humankind. And that's what then became the room statute. And from 1985 to 1996, Ecoside was included in all of that for 11 years. Until finally one day at a closed door meeting with fewer people than we have here today, it was removed. Both as a wartime crime and article A2B that deals with environmental harm, and it was watered down, but also as a peace crime. No reasons were given and many countries, including this country, had supported Ecoside as an international crime. Now, these are not my opinions. This is from the records that were found in the basement. Thankfully someone took records of that actual meeting when it was removed. And very quickly that group on working group on crimes against the environment was closed. And indeed it just disappeared, disappeared off the radar. Some countries objected at that meeting, and thankfully someone took note of that. But also the UN rapporteurs at that time, they put in writing and submitted that, put that into the UN basement, their own opinions as to why this had happened. So this is not my opinion. This is the opinions of those who had been heavily involved in the drafting during that period. That four, possibly five, but four definitely countries had lobbied behind the scenes to have it removed. And the countries were the US, UK, France and the Netherlands. Now, to give that political context back in 1996 when it was removed, that was the year that genetic modification was first introduced into supermarket shelves in the UN. In fact, it was a very important judgment going through the international court of justice on the use of nuclear weapons. And it was hoped that that would go in the full way to say that it was illegal to use them. It didn't quite go there. In the opinion of the UN rapporteurs who left records of that meeting, they say that France had objected because it would potentially criminalise the use of nuclear weapons and the use of what we do with nuclear waste, which is of course a ton of nuclear weapons. But also that there was a vested interest from the fossil fuel industry, primarily those who are based in the Netherlands and the UK and the US. And that 1996 was the year when it decided to really scale up on commercial tariff extraction and move forward with fracking in a really big way. This is not my opinion. These are the records that we have. Now, where does this leave us then today? Well, here we are nearly 20 years on from that time when it very nearly became an international crime. And you could say maybe that we're in a worse position, not a better position. But what is very interesting also is that we've also had 30, in fact 40 years, if you take it from the Stockholm conference, of conventions, treaties, agreements, UN resolutions, all to do with the environment. In fact there are over 500 documents of international documents dealing with the environment one way or another in law. But we're in a worse position and not a better position. And what is very interesting is that when I was first writing my initial proposal and that became my first move, eradicating ecocide, I looked into where in history have we seen something similar playing out before? And I looked back to the abolition of slavery. I also looked at civil rights and apartheid and genocide. What was it? How did we get to that point where we finally outlawed it and made it a crime? And what I saw as a pattern emerging that with the abolition of slavery there was about 40 years of agreements, treaties, I actually having governments coming together, I declarations of intent to bring something to an end and yet at the same time it was escalating, not getting better. And again you see this very clearly with apartheid as well, 35 years, same thing, convention, treaties, declarations, UN resolutions and if escalates. And only when it gets to the point of woof we have to make this a crime. A apartheid became a crime against humanity, woof, who didn't actually stop. So this is also about the spectrum of law if you like. At one end you have voluntary agreements. In business you have, in modern day context, the UN global compact. That's a voluntary agreement that business can sign up to. And you're moving through them from a voluntary agreement space, maybe resolutions within the United Nations and you move along, you start dealing with treaties but treaties that have no enforcement powers. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is a very good example of that. In the UK we are signatories to that and yet every year we actually hold a market where we buy and sell nuclear weapons. Because there's nothing in that treaty, although we're signed up to ensure that we do not proliferate nuclear weapons that prohibits it. It's not a crime. The business of making nuclear weapons is not a crime. So moving along that spectrum, we end up, we get to a point where yes you can have laws in place that allows civil litigation. The private individual or the community can, at their own cost and time and expense, bring a case against a company or an individual that's causing harm in some way. Usually a company, it's usually actually taking action for instance within environmental law against a big company that's coming in. We're talking about this over lunchtime. There's a balance to be decided here. The balance between development and harm. You don't always win in that context and often you can spend many years, sometimes over a decade, fighting a case. Even when the success is often too little too late. I'm thinking particularly about the text from Chevron case for instance in Ecuador. 13 years. A judgement in favour of the communities who are adversely impacted and continue to be adversely impacted today. And yet that payment still, to my knowledge, hasn't been made. No. And what is so interesting here is that it's not a true route to justice. So you get to that point where it becomes a crime. You can actually turn around and say okay this is now prohibited. We are now closing the door to it once and for all. You draw a line in the sand and say we cannot go there. Now we were talking about lunchtime. Now it's giving an example of the difference between civil and criminal law. There is a very big difference. The one in part civil law is how it's uncovered upon you as the individual or your community to take that action. But criminal law then becomes a state duty to act on your behalf. And that's very important. It's also, it's more than that, criminal law is about how we take a moral wrong and make it a legal wrong. There's a Latin phrase for this. When man in say becomes man prohibited. When something is so wrong in and of himself we prohibited. Just as we did with the abolition of slavery. Just as we did with genocide. Just as we did with apartheid. Now you may argue yes we still have genocide playing out but it's the exception not the normative. You may argue that yes we still have slavery playing out with girls shipped in from Latvia for prostitution. But at least we have some recourse to justice. At least as a court advocate I have tools in my legal toolbox that I can use to take action. Or more than that that the state where it's a crime becomes a common to the state to take action. But at the moment with mass damage and destruction it's not a crime. And this is very important to you because we're missing law. Here we are. Forty odd years of many, many agreements, treaties, conventions, protocols, what have you. And we haven't got to the point to say significant harm is a crime. I'd like to go back to the example that we were discussing at lunchtime where a criminal court of law does not distinguish between a brutal and a bad harm. And yet the narrative at the moment is all about that. So we have a narrative that has emerged over the last 40 years that's continued on and on. It's like one of these loops that just keeps on going. It's like watching CNN news. It just keeps on going. Who's going? Who's going? Who's going? And that narrative is along the lines of well we've got to balance the interests of development versus the wellbeing of our community. And development wins and how we balance that off. But criminal law just doesn't have that discourse within it. Criminal law stands very clearly if this is a harm it has to stop.