(Brussels, May 15, 2025) – The adoption of the Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law on May 14 by the Council of Europe’s 46 member states is a pivotal step for environmental protection and justice, Climate Rights International said today. The new Convention creates a powerful regional legal framework to combat serious environmental crimes—including acts tantamount to ecocide—and reflects growing international momentum to use the force of law to confront the accelerating destruction of the environment, biodiversity, and the climate system.
However, the 46 member states of the Council of Europe missed a critical opportunity to advance protection of the right to a healthy environment by failing to launch the process for an Additional Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights agreed in its 2023 Reykjavík Declaration. The right to a healthy environment has already been recognized in a non-binding 2022 UN General Assembly resolution. All 46 Council of Europe member states voted for that resolution. An Additional Protocol is urgently needed to establish legal clarity and ensure the comprehensive protection of the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. It would help avoid fragmented national approaches and instead harness the full potential of existing Council of Europe mechanisms, including the European Court of Human Rights, to uphold these rights in line with the growing body of international legal recognition and climate urgency.
“The new Council of Europe convention is a major milestone in recognizing that serious environmental and climate destruction is not only a policy failure, it is a crime, and a crime that must be prosecuted,” said Lotte Leicht, Advocacy Director at Climate Rights International. “Criminal law must now be fully used to confront the grave harms of environmental destruction and hold perpetrators accountable, including governments, corporations, and individuals.”
The new Convention was negotiated over two years by the 46 member states of the Council of Europe. It marks the first international legally binding treaty focused solely on the criminal dimensions of environmental harm.
The Convention criminalizes a wide range of serious environmental offenses, including unlawful pollution, hazardous waste management, illegal mining, trade in unlawfully harvested timber, and illegal destruction of protected habitat, fauna, and flora. Notably, it enables states to prosecute the particularly serious offense of intentional unlawful acts that could result in severe environmental damage such as widespread pollution, major industrial incidents, or large-scale forest fires, as offenses “comparable to ecocide.”
“This important and growing legal architecture across Europe signals the beginning of the end to impunity for those calculating that environmental destruction is good for business and will not result in criminal consequences,” said Leicht. “There is now a clear mandate and obligation on the part of states to hold polluters and profiteers to account.”
Environmental crimes constitute the fourth-largest criminal activity in the world, according to a joint Interpol and United Nations Environmental Program estimate; according to the FBI, it is the third-largest. The Council of Europe Convention follows closely on the heels of the European Union’s recent Environmental Crime Directive, which entered into force in May 2024. In September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa formally submitted a proposal to amend the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute to cover the crime of ecocide, defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being cause by those acts.”
“Together, these legally binding initiatives reflect a growing understanding that mass destruction of the environment and climate system must not only be prevented but also be prosecuted, especially where it causes grave, widespread, or irreversible harm,” said Leicht. “The Council of Europe now needs to urgently regroup to also create a binding legal right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.”
