As a consequence of the corruption cases in the European Parliament, the EPP demands stronger transparency rules for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Representatives of NGOs defend themselves – and speak of a “witch hunt”. Charlotte Wirth took a closer look at the cases of the NGOs involved in the corruption scandal, No Peace Without Justice and Fight Impunity. Her conclusion: The machinations did not go unnoticed because NGOs were at work, but because the EU Commission, the European Parliament and the Belgian authorities did not sufficiently monitor compliance with the applicable rules.
To have a say in the development of global ESG standards, a strong ecosystem in Europe and a “common language” is needed. Carole Sirou, director of the French ESG rating agency Ethifinance, is convinced of this. In an interview with Claire Stam, she explains why a European player is needed to counter the American rating giants.
Ecocide, i.e. massive damage to and destruction of ecosystems, is still not recognized in European law. Green MEP Marie Toussaint wants to change that. She is campaigning for ecocide to be enshrined in the EU directive on environmental crime. This is particularly about environmental damage in armed conflicts, such as currently in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Read more in Claire Stam’s column: What’s cooking in Brussels.
“The Kaili/Panzeri corruption case could have been prevented by sufficient transparency in NGOs,” Markus Pieper said on Monday in the plenary session of the European Parliament. The CDU politician has been calling for more disclosure requirements for years – in 2017 he was rapporteur of an own-initiative report on NGO transparency. But the EPP withdrew the report due to opposition from civil society as well as the left wing in the Parliament.
Because of Qatargate, the EPP is now reviving the demands from the report. These include:
But what actually are NGOs? The question is not easy to answer because there is no internationally recognized definition. In a special report from 2018, the European Court of Auditors refers to a communication from the EU Commission from 1997, according to which they are voluntary, formalized organizations that do not distribute profits, act independently of government authorities, and whose activities at least partially serve the common good.
Markus Pieper went further in his 2017 report, targeting organizations working in the fields of health, social policy, the environment or development aid. Pieper also made a clear distinction between NGOs and lobbying organizations. NGOs, he demanded, should only receive funding if they did not spread lies, their goals were compatible with the fundamental values of the EU, and they did not act against the “strategic, trade, and security policy goals” of the EU.
The NGO status of an organization cannot be derived from its legal form either. An NGO can, for example, be a registered association (e. V.), an “a.s.b.l.” (non-profit association) under Belgian law, or a foundation. Thus, in 2018, the Court of Auditors again held that “in most cases, eligibility for funding does not depend on NGO status“. And, “The EU budget does not distinguish between beneficiaries with NGO status and other beneficiaries”.
Concrete example: Pier Antonio Panzeri’s NGO Fight Impunity was registered as a.s.b.l. under Belgian law. This can be verified via the Belgian business register. Thus, it had the same status as several lobbying associations in Brussels: The industry association Business Europe, for example, is registered as a.s.b.l..
The registration documents of Fight Impunity can be found in the Belgian commercial register. Technically, the annual balance sheets of the NGO should also be available. According to Belgian law, small associations must file them annually with the Commercial Court and large associations with the National Bank. All a.s.b.l. are subject to the control of the Commercial Court and the Ministry of Justice.
Fight Impunity lacks any balance sheet documents, as a visit to the Commercial Court shows. Annual financial statements are also missing for another organization involved in cataracts, No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ). NPWJ was founded by Niccolo Figa Talamanca, the Italian accused of corruption and money laundering. No financial statements have ever been filed for any of his numerous organizations.
The European Commission should have noticed this. It paid out around €4 million to NPWJ in recent years. In doing so, it did not respect its own rules: According to the EU Financial Regulation, for “grants for an action of more than €750,000 or for operating costs of more than €100,000, beneficiaries must submit a report drawn up by an external auditor,” including certified balance sheets for the last (up to three) years. NPWJ received amounts of more than €2 million from the Commission twice. The absence of any balance sheets should not have escaped its attention.
Panzeri’s NGO Fight Impunity regularly cooperated with the European Parliament. The latter also failed to check whether the organization complied with its transparency obligation. The organization was not in the transparency register, although stakeholders must register there if they organize or participate in events in the Parliament.
And while the Commission publishes all grants to advocacy groups, including those to NPWJ, in its financial transparency register, the Parliament does not have to account for engagements below €15,000. The cooperation with Fight Impunity cannot be traced anywhere.
If Panzeri’s bogus organization had been in the EU transparency register, it would also have had to disclose its donors. This is already mandatory for NGOs. It is, above all, the inadequate controls of the European institutions that led to Fight Impunity falling through the cracks.
The Court of Audit already pointed out similar shortcomings in 2018: It criticized the fact that the selection procedures for grants to NGOs were not always transparent and that it was not always possible to trace how the funding to NGOs was used.
What’s more: beneficiaries of EU funding who violate the Financial Regulation must actually be in a publicly accessible register called EDES. Only four entities are listed there. NPWJ is not among them until today.
It stands to reason that it was not the NGO status but the legal form of Fight Impunity that facilitated Panzeri’s machinations. Non-profit associations are poorly controlled in Belgium, explains whistleblower Claude Archer of Transparencia Belgium: “A.s.b.l. are the preferred tool for public and private structures to engage in corruption and money laundering.” The balance sheets and minutes of general meetings are not available online, he says, so people have to go to the commercial court and pay for more expensive copies to see the accounts. “Inspections by Belgian authorities are also very rare and poorly executed.”
Indeed, there are numerous examples in which Belgian a.s.b.l. have been abused. One of them is Azerigate: In 2017, two Council of Europe deputies used a Belgian election monitoring association to launder Azerbaijani bribes. German MPs Karin Strenz (CDU) and Eduard Lintner (CSU) were also implicated in the affair.
“The EPP may be right in saying that NGOs have a lot of influence in the Brussels bubble,” says John Dalhuisen of the European Stability Initiative, which uncovered Azerigate. “However, she is wrong when she claims that they are particularly vulnerable to corruption. What went wrong with Qatargate was that Parliament and the Commission didn’t enforce their own rules.”
While the EPP wants to put its transparency demands only on non-governmental organizations, the latter demand stricter rules for all stakeholders, whether they are NGOs or other interest groups. “It is a witch hunt against NGOs. The EPP is now instrumentalizing cataracts to further restrict civil society’s scope of action,” says Alberto Alemanno of The Good Lobby.
As SPD MEP René Ripasi put it on Monday, “It takes two to tango. We must consistently reject any influence.”
Movement in the silent world of green finance: At a stage when US corporations were buying up European ESG rating “nuggets,” Europeans are responding with their own activities. In February 2022, for example, Ethifinance was founded after the French company Qivalio, acquired Axesor Rating, Spain’s No. 1 credit rating company.
The goal is to become a “leading European player in research, advisory and integrated financial and ESG rating,” Ethifinance Director Carole Sirou said in an interview with Table.Media in Paris.
Carole Sirou, who had spent some thirty years at Standard & Poor’s Ratings, was hired four months after Ethifinance’s launch. Her task is to accelerate the development of this player that wants to be in the league of the big players in the field of ESG ratings while remaining independent.
A French national, she brings great knowledge of the US financial and ESG markets: She joined Standard & Poor’s Ratings in 1990 and became successively president of S&P France and head of French-speaking Europe and Africa. She then headed the six European offices before being transferred to New York in 2014 to implement the new CRA regulations. Between 2016 and 2018, she held various risk and compliance leadership positions within S&P Global Inc.
To have a say in the development of global ESG standards, Carole Sirou is convinced that a strong ecosystem is needed in Europe. For example, European investors and European agents need to be able to read European-produced analysis on companies in Europe, “which is difficult today.” That’s because currently, in the European ESG market, “there are no common tools, no common ‘language’ that allows Europe to analyze its own economic fabric, be it from a financial or non-financial point of view,” she says. To be able to develop a common language, she explains, you first have to find the points of convergence.
This is all the more true, she says, because there is “a very strong divergence of views” between ESG players from the US and Europe, especially on “the environmental and social aspects.” The director of Ethifinance even speaks of a “clash” between the two economic areas in this context. “It seems crucial and vital for us to defend a certain model, a certain way of thinking about economics and finance.”
In this context, Carole Sirou points out that the European market for ESG data is currently being structured, mainly through EFRAG‘s work on sustainability reporting standards and the implementation of the European taxonomy. “The European market for analysis is constantly improving and accelerating strongly, as there is an ever-increasing demand for quantity and quality, which we are trying to meet as best we can,” she stresses.
Ethifinance first plans to expand its activities in Southern Europe (France, Spain, Portugal). Then the company wants to turn to the Scandinavian countries and Germany, a market considered “inevitable” because of its economic weight, its potential – and its connections with France. The group aims to cover 2,300 companies by the fall. It focuses mainly on SMEs with a market capitalization of €150 million to €10 billion.
The sustainable finance expert sees this expansion as “a first important step towards building a European dual materiality agency” that could play a leading role in Europe. “To analyze a company from an ESG perspective, you need to look not only at the impact of the environment on the company, but also the impact of the company on its environment,” says Carole Sirou.
“This is one of the main points that differentiate us from our American competitors,” she adds. This strategy makes it possible to “establish a link between the concept of impact and the sustainable development goals,” she explains. The Ethifinance director points to the example of the fires in California. Much of it, she says, was caused by the national operator’s failure to maintain this infrastructure.
The decarbonization of companies is Ethifinance’s other strategic pillar. Even if the climate issue “remains central,” the director calls declining biodiversity an “inevitable” issue to which answers must be found. “We are convinced that the financial sector has a role to play in implementing environmental and energy change,” Carole Sirou continues, adding that through financing and investment, finance can “bring about behavioral change.”
Ecocide is broadly defined as massive damage to and destruction of ecosystems – that is, widespread or long-term serious damage to nature.
“When I came to the European Parliament in 2019, the concept was completely unknown to the European institutions,” says French MEP Marie Toussaint, who is taking the ecocide fight to Brussels. In the meantime, she says, “things have moved quickly,” thanks to the persistent work of numerous lawyers, advocates, judges and academics, as well as the increasing mobilization of civil society. “Today, the recognition of ecocide could well be recognized in the Environmental Crimes Directive, which is currently being revised,” she says.
Toussaint is referring to a proposal she is introducing on behalf of her group – which is about enshrining ecocide in the Environmental Crime Directive. The Greens base this on the definition of the Stop Ecocide Foundation, which describes ecocide as “unlawful or indiscriminate acts committed with the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of serious and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment (…)”.
Toussaint’s initiative specifically addresses environmental damage in armed conflicts, such as Russia’s current war against Ukraine. As a result of Russian attacks, Ukraine has suffered great environmental damage in many ways: Forests have been destroyed, agricultural fields ruined, and rivers polluted.
The prospects that the bill will be passed by the Parliament are good: there is currently no veto from the European Parliament. Four out of five committees (PETI, DEVE, LIBE and ENVI) that were supposed to give their opinion on the Environmental Crime Directive have already supported the recognition of ecocide and also follow the definition of the Stop Ecocide Foundation.
The last parliamentary committee, the Legal Affairs Committee, which is responsible for the dossier, is expected to give its opinion at the end of March – “negotiations are still underway.” The vote in plenary will then take place in April and “we are confident that the European Parliament will officially support the inclusion of ecocide in the law there,” says Toussaint.
However, the negotiations will not end there, as the text will then be discussed in trilogue with the Commission and the European Council. “The Commission had not included recognition of this crime in its original proposal, but is increasingly using the term in its communications.”
The member states will probably be the most difficult to convince, “but with a strong position of the Parliament, everything is possible”. In this context, Marie Toussaint emphasizes that the situation in the member states is different:
So does this mean that Ukraine can sue Russia for environmental crimes? Marie Toussaint points out that both Ukraine and Russia have recognized the crime of ecocide. But the question arises as to which courts can even deal with this crime.
“For this to happen, the crime of ecocide must be recognized internationally,” says the MEP. It is true that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court contains an article on war crimes that explicitly deals with environmental protection. But it is complicated to invoke, she says, and it has never been used by the ICC. That’s why they are fighting to have the crime of ecocide recognized in the Rome Statute, in both wartime and peacetime, Toussaint says.
At the last General Assembly of the ICC, the recognition of ecocide had been an important topic of discussion. In the context of the war in Ukraine, he says, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called for its urgent recognition. “Overall, we are seeing a real upsurge for ecocide recognition,” Toussaint says. It is urgent, she explained, “because the survival of humanity is at stake.”
As a consequence of the corruption cases in the European Parliament, the EPP demands stronger transparency rules for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Representatives of NGOs defend themselves – and speak of a “witch hunt”. Charlotte Wirth took a closer look at the cases of the NGOs involved in the corruption scandal, No Peace Without Justice and Fight Impunity. Her conclusion: The machinations did not go unnoticed because NGOs were at work, but because the EU Commission, the European Parliament and the Belgian authorities did not sufficiently monitor compliance with the applicable rules.
To have a say in the development of global ESG standards, a strong ecosystem in Europe and a “common language” is needed. Carole Sirou, director of the French ESG rating agency Ethifinance, is convinced of this. In an interview with Claire Stam, she explains why a European player is needed to counter the American rating giants.
Ecocide, i.e. massive damage to and destruction of ecosystems, is still not recognized in European law. Green MEP Marie Toussaint wants to change that. She is campaigning for ecocide to be enshrined in the EU directive on environmental crime. This is particularly about environmental damage in armed conflicts, such as currently in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Read more in Claire Stam’s column: What’s cooking in Brussels.
“The Kaili/Panzeri corruption case could have been prevented by sufficient transparency in NGOs,” Markus Pieper said on Monday in the plenary session of the European Parliament. The CDU politician has been calling for more disclosure requirements for years – in 2017 he was rapporteur of an own-initiative report on NGO transparency. But the EPP withdrew the report due to opposition from civil society as well as the left wing in the Parliament.
Because of Qatargate, the EPP is now reviving the demands from the report. These include:
But what actually are NGOs? The question is not easy to answer because there is no internationally recognized definition. In a special report from 2018, the European Court of Auditors refers to a communication from the EU Commission from 1997, according to which they are voluntary, formalized organizations that do not distribute profits, act independently of government authorities, and whose activities at least partially serve the common good.
Markus Pieper went further in his 2017 report, targeting organizations working in the fields of health, social policy, the environment or development aid. Pieper also made a clear distinction between NGOs and lobbying organizations. NGOs, he demanded, should only receive funding if they did not spread lies, their goals were compatible with the fundamental values of the EU, and they did not act against the “strategic, trade, and security policy goals” of the EU.
The NGO status of an organization cannot be derived from its legal form either. An NGO can, for example, be a registered association (e. V.), an “a.s.b.l.” (non-profit association) under Belgian law, or a foundation. Thus, in 2018, the Court of Auditors again held that “in most cases, eligibility for funding does not depend on NGO status“. And, “The EU budget does not distinguish between beneficiaries with NGO status and other beneficiaries”.
Concrete example: Pier Antonio Panzeri’s NGO Fight Impunity was registered as a.s.b.l. under Belgian law. This can be verified via the Belgian business register. Thus, it had the same status as several lobbying associations in Brussels: The industry association Business Europe, for example, is registered as a.s.b.l..
The registration documents of Fight Impunity can be found in the Belgian commercial register. Technically, the annual balance sheets of the NGO should also be available. According to Belgian law, small associations must file them annually with the Commercial Court and large associations with the National Bank. All a.s.b.l. are subject to the control of the Commercial Court and the Ministry of Justice.
Fight Impunity lacks any balance sheet documents, as a visit to the Commercial Court shows. Annual financial statements are also missing for another organization involved in cataracts, No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ). NPWJ was founded by Niccolo Figa Talamanca, the Italian accused of corruption and money laundering. No financial statements have ever been filed for any of his numerous organizations.
The European Commission should have noticed this. It paid out around €4 million to NPWJ in recent years. In doing so, it did not respect its own rules: According to the EU Financial Regulation, for “grants for an action of more than €750,000 or for operating costs of more than €100,000, beneficiaries must submit a report drawn up by an external auditor,” including certified balance sheets for the last (up to three) years. NPWJ received amounts of more than €2 million from the Commission twice. The absence of any balance sheets should not have escaped its attention.
Panzeri’s NGO Fight Impunity regularly cooperated with the European Parliament. The latter also failed to check whether the organization complied with its transparency obligation. The organization was not in the transparency register, although stakeholders must register there if they organize or participate in events in the Parliament.
And while the Commission publishes all grants to advocacy groups, including those to NPWJ, in its financial transparency register, the Parliament does not have to account for engagements below €15,000. The cooperation with Fight Impunity cannot be traced anywhere.
If Panzeri’s bogus organization had been in the EU transparency register, it would also have had to disclose its donors. This is already mandatory for NGOs. It is, above all, the inadequate controls of the European institutions that led to Fight Impunity falling through the cracks.
The Court of Audit already pointed out similar shortcomings in 2018: It criticized the fact that the selection procedures for grants to NGOs were not always transparent and that it was not always possible to trace how the funding to NGOs was used.
What’s more: beneficiaries of EU funding who violate the Financial Regulation must actually be in a publicly accessible register called EDES. Only four entities are listed there. NPWJ is not among them until today.
It stands to reason that it was not the NGO status but the legal form of Fight Impunity that facilitated Panzeri’s machinations. Non-profit associations are poorly controlled in Belgium, explains whistleblower Claude Archer of Transparencia Belgium: “A.s.b.l. are the preferred tool for public and private structures to engage in corruption and money laundering.” The balance sheets and minutes of general meetings are not available online, he says, so people have to go to the commercial court and pay for more expensive copies to see the accounts. “Inspections by Belgian authorities are also very rare and poorly executed.”
Indeed, there are numerous examples in which Belgian a.s.b.l. have been abused. One of them is Azerigate: In 2017, two Council of Europe deputies used a Belgian election monitoring association to launder Azerbaijani bribes. German MPs Karin Strenz (CDU) and Eduard Lintner (CSU) were also implicated in the affair.
“The EPP may be right in saying that NGOs have a lot of influence in the Brussels bubble,” says John Dalhuisen of the European Stability Initiative, which uncovered Azerigate. “However, she is wrong when she claims that they are particularly vulnerable to corruption. What went wrong with Qatargate was that Parliament and the Commission didn’t enforce their own rules.”
While the EPP wants to put its transparency demands only on non-governmental organizations, the latter demand stricter rules for all stakeholders, whether they are NGOs or other interest groups. “It is a witch hunt against NGOs. The EPP is now instrumentalizing cataracts to further restrict civil society’s scope of action,” says Alberto Alemanno of The Good Lobby.
As SPD MEP René Ripasi put it on Monday, “It takes two to tango. We must consistently reject any influence.”
Movement in the silent world of green finance: At a stage when US corporations were buying up European ESG rating “nuggets,” Europeans are responding with their own activities. In February 2022, for example, Ethifinance was founded after the French company Qivalio, acquired Axesor Rating, Spain’s No. 1 credit rating company.
The goal is to become a “leading European player in research, advisory and integrated financial and ESG rating,” Ethifinance Director Carole Sirou said in an interview with Table.Media in Paris.
Carole Sirou, who had spent some thirty years at Standard & Poor’s Ratings, was hired four months after Ethifinance’s launch. Her task is to accelerate the development of this player that wants to be in the league of the big players in the field of ESG ratings while remaining independent.
A French national, she brings great knowledge of the US financial and ESG markets: She joined Standard & Poor’s Ratings in 1990 and became successively president of S&P France and head of French-speaking Europe and Africa. She then headed the six European offices before being transferred to New York in 2014 to implement the new CRA regulations. Between 2016 and 2018, she held various risk and compliance leadership positions within S&P Global Inc.
To have a say in the development of global ESG standards, Carole Sirou is convinced that a strong ecosystem is needed in Europe. For example, European investors and European agents need to be able to read European-produced analysis on companies in Europe, “which is difficult today.” That’s because currently, in the European ESG market, “there are no common tools, no common ‘language’ that allows Europe to analyze its own economic fabric, be it from a financial or non-financial point of view,” she says. To be able to develop a common language, she explains, you first have to find the points of convergence.
This is all the more true, she says, because there is “a very strong divergence of views” between ESG players from the US and Europe, especially on “the environmental and social aspects.” The director of Ethifinance even speaks of a “clash” between the two economic areas in this context. “It seems crucial and vital for us to defend a certain model, a certain way of thinking about economics and finance.”
In this context, Carole Sirou points out that the European market for ESG data is currently being structured, mainly through EFRAG‘s work on sustainability reporting standards and the implementation of the European taxonomy. “The European market for analysis is constantly improving and accelerating strongly, as there is an ever-increasing demand for quantity and quality, which we are trying to meet as best we can,” she stresses.
Ethifinance first plans to expand its activities in Southern Europe (France, Spain, Portugal). Then the company wants to turn to the Scandinavian countries and Germany, a market considered “inevitable” because of its economic weight, its potential – and its connections with France. The group aims to cover 2,300 companies by the fall. It focuses mainly on SMEs with a market capitalization of €150 million to €10 billion.
The sustainable finance expert sees this expansion as “a first important step towards building a European dual materiality agency” that could play a leading role in Europe. “To analyze a company from an ESG perspective, you need to look not only at the impact of the environment on the company, but also the impact of the company on its environment,” says Carole Sirou.
“This is one of the main points that differentiate us from our American competitors,” she adds. This strategy makes it possible to “establish a link between the concept of impact and the sustainable development goals,” she explains. The Ethifinance director points to the example of the fires in California. Much of it, she says, was caused by the national operator’s failure to maintain this infrastructure.
The decarbonization of companies is Ethifinance’s other strategic pillar. Even if the climate issue “remains central,” the director calls declining biodiversity an “inevitable” issue to which answers must be found. “We are convinced that the financial sector has a role to play in implementing environmental and energy change,” Carole Sirou continues, adding that through financing and investment, finance can “bring about behavioral change.”
Ecocide is broadly defined as massive damage to and destruction of ecosystems – that is, widespread or long-term serious damage to nature.
“When I came to the European Parliament in 2019, the concept was completely unknown to the European institutions,” says French MEP Marie Toussaint, who is taking the ecocide fight to Brussels. In the meantime, she says, “things have moved quickly,” thanks to the persistent work of numerous lawyers, advocates, judges and academics, as well as the increasing mobilization of civil society. “Today, the recognition of ecocide could well be recognized in the Environmental Crimes Directive, which is currently being revised,” she says.
Toussaint is referring to a proposal she is introducing on behalf of her group – which is about enshrining ecocide in the Environmental Crime Directive. The Greens base this on the definition of the Stop Ecocide Foundation, which describes ecocide as “unlawful or indiscriminate acts committed with the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of serious and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment (…)”.
Toussaint’s initiative specifically addresses environmental damage in armed conflicts, such as Russia’s current war against Ukraine. As a result of Russian attacks, Ukraine has suffered great environmental damage in many ways: Forests have been destroyed, agricultural fields ruined, and rivers polluted.
The prospects that the bill will be passed by the Parliament are good: there is currently no veto from the European Parliament. Four out of five committees (PETI, DEVE, LIBE and ENVI) that were supposed to give their opinion on the Environmental Crime Directive have already supported the recognition of ecocide and also follow the definition of the Stop Ecocide Foundation.
The last parliamentary committee, the Legal Affairs Committee, which is responsible for the dossier, is expected to give its opinion at the end of March – “negotiations are still underway.” The vote in plenary will then take place in April and “we are confident that the European Parliament will officially support the inclusion of ecocide in the law there,” says Toussaint.
However, the negotiations will not end there, as the text will then be discussed in trilogue with the Commission and the European Council. “The Commission had not included recognition of this crime in its original proposal, but is increasingly using the term in its communications.”
The member states will probably be the most difficult to convince, “but with a strong position of the Parliament, everything is possible”. In this context, Marie Toussaint emphasizes that the situation in the member states is different:
So does this mean that Ukraine can sue Russia for environmental crimes? Marie Toussaint points out that both Ukraine and Russia have recognized the crime of ecocide. But the question arises as to which courts can even deal with this crime.
“For this to happen, the crime of ecocide must be recognized internationally,” says the MEP. It is true that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court contains an article on war crimes that explicitly deals with environmental protection. But it is complicated to invoke, she says, and it has never been used by the ICC. That’s why they are fighting to have the crime of ecocide recognized in the Rome Statute, in both wartime and peacetime, Toussaint says.
At the last General Assembly of the ICC, the recognition of ecocide had been an important topic of discussion. In the context of the war in Ukraine, he says, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called for its urgent recognition. “Overall, we are seeing a real upsurge for ecocide recognition,” Toussaint says. It is urgent, she explained, “because the survival of humanity is at stake.”
