Ekobójstwo. Ku nowej kategorii międzynarodowego prawa karnego

Abstract

The article presents the assumptions of the most recent international criminal legislation on ecocide, its legal definition as the fifth crime against humanity, its relation to the international and national regulations already in force, and, finally, its implications for the domestic criminal law system. The new type of offence is about to be introduced into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The author shows a number of rationales to justify an appropriate revision of domestic criminal law. Further, she points to the Nuremberg Clause, in which Łukasz Pohl identified an indisputable normative safeguard for the application of international criminal norms to perpetrators of unlawful acts against humanity in case the national legislature would not update the criminal law. The research was carried out by analysing historical (Rafał Lemkin) and current theoretical-legal and philosophical-legal sources, as well as through a dogmatic analysis of legal acts, and, finally by using an exemplification of ecocide as a crime against humanity due to severe and irreversible destruction of the natural environment.