Cardiff academics give evidence on Scottish Ecocide Bill

Two Cardiff academics have recently given evidence before the Scottish Parliament on the Ecocide (Scotland) Bill, which was introduced by Monica Lennon MSP earlier this year.

The  Ecocide (Scotland) Bill, which is currently in the first stage of scrutiny before the Net Zero, Energy & Transport Committee of the Scottish Parliament, aims to criminalise the most serious types of environmental harm, widely known as ‘Ecocide’, in Scotland.

This November, Dr Ricardo Pereira, Reader in Law at Cardiff University Law & Politics School, appeared as a witness before the Net Zero, Energy & Transport Committee in a Panel on ‘The International Dimensions of Ecocide’, alongside two leading researchers working on the criminalisation of ecocide: Dr Rachel Killean, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney, and Dr Suwita Hani Randhawa, Senior Lecturer, University of Western England. The Panel considered the wider dimensions and perspectives of criminalising ecocide internationally, as well as the implications of the proposed Ecocide Bill for Scotland.

This followed an earlier appearance in September 2025 by Professor Valerie Fogleman before the same Net Zero, Energy & Transport Committee, in which she gave evidence on civil liability and environmental remediation perspectives of a future legal framework criminalising Ecocide in Scotland.

If the Bill is adopted, Scotland would become another leading nation in Europe to criminalise Ecocide, following its criminalisation in France and Belgium in 2021 and 2024 respectively, and the adoption of the EU revised Environmental Crime Directive in 2024, which criminalises ‘qualified’ environmental offences which are ‘comparable to Ecocide’ in the EU Member States.

Video or typeset recordings of the two proceedings can be accessed on the Scottish Parliament website.

Dr Ricardo Pereira’s appearance as a witness before the Scottish Parliament follows the publication of his previous influential work in the field of Ecocide, including an article published in the Criminal Law Forum in 2020 and his research monograph published by Brill in 2015. His most recent publications in the field of environmental crime and ecocide include: A Research Agenda for Environmental Crime and the Law (Edward Elgar, 2025); ‘Ecocide, Human Rights and the Prospects for Corporate Accountability before the International Criminal Court and Domestic Courts’ in R. Pereira, L. McConnell and A. Savaresi (eds.) ‘Business, Human Rights and Natural Resource Governance: Accountability for a Just Transition’ (Bloomsbury- Hart Publishing, in press) and ‘A Critical Evaluation of the New EU Environmental Crime Directive 2024/1203’, EurCrim, 2024 (Issue 2).  

Professor Valerie Fogleman’s recent work on environmental civil and criminal liability includes a report on the pollution pays principle in the European Union commissioned by the European Commission and published in 2024 and a Study in support of the evaluation of the Environmental Liability Directive and its implementation, also commissioned and published by the European Commission in 2024.