My Lords, it is interesting to hear the views of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, but I take a different line. As a member of Peers for the Planet, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, on introducing the concept behind these amendments to your Lordships’ House and I am pleased to add my name to them.
I confess I was disappointed when my questions to the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, about adding the crime of ecocide to the Rome statute received, first, the answer that there were no such plans. His next answer, which I have just received in time—for which I am grateful—adduced various traditional diplomatic reasons, but I still hope we can make a start. I think we should.
Of course, ecocide is an innovatory idea, and innovations are disturbing and disruptive. This one requires different thinking about human rights. The Rome statute and, for that matter, the United Nations human rights instruments have a specific human focus on what is needed to establish and maintain well-being. We in the UK have taken an even narrower view, in that we have not implemented the economic and social rights set out in the convention, only the civil and political ones. But the concept of ecocide is hardly dangerously revolutionary; it was mooted by Olof Palme in 1972 and, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Boycott, say, France and others are in the process of incorporating it into their laws.
Our environment is so critical to our well-being that we need to think in new ways about how to protect it from the damage being done to it. I think all your Lordships value our natural environment. That clearly emerges from the debates on this Bill and the answers of the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith. We should put that into practice by cherishing its biological and botanical elements and, therefore, ought to support efforts to get this into international law.
Already one of our most distinguished human rights lawyers, Philippe Sands QC, is working on how this value can be made justiciable at the International Criminal Court. The definition has now been agreed by all 12 of the eminent international lawyers in the group he chairs. For once, I hope our Government can be a bit ahead of the curve and support these amendments.