New Policy Allows The Hague to Prosecute Land Grabbers in Africa

In a landmark expansion of its remit, the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced in a policy paper on September 15, 2016 that cases regarding environmental justice would be included in the purview of the Court. Corporate executives, politicians, and other individuals may be prosecuted in the future under international law for crimes related to environmental destruction, including illegal “land grabbing” and unlawful exploitation of natural resources. Since its inception under the 1998 Rome Statute, the Hague-based Court has traditionally prosecuted four main crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. The announcement comes from the office of the Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, a Gambian lawyer and the ICC’s chief prosecutor since June 2012. Her plan to give particular consideration to environmental crimes is a critical step in filling a legal vacuum that has driven violence and theft in the name of profit in developing countries, often during peacetime. The decision comes at a pivotal moment in which the Prosecutor is deciding whether to investigate a 2014 case regarding mass human rights abuses linked to systematic land expropriation in Cambodia, which will be a key test of the new policy.

Though experts say the paper does not technically change the definition of crimes under the purview of the ICC, nor expand the reach of international law, it does signal a subtle shift in focus that has a myriad of potential effects. Since 2000, an area the size of Germany has been leased to investors in developing countries amid a global rush for land and natural resources like biofuels that has illegally and often violently displaced millions from their land in countries lacking functional national courts to redress such injustices. According to Global Witness data, more than three people per week were killed in 2015 while defending their land from theft and destructive industries.

The ICC’s new pivot to environmental justice has particular implications for Africa, which has seen extensive land grabs across the continent by supranational firms. Legal ambiguity and weak property rights surrounding land tenure have precipitated violence, displacement and social unrest among rural communities. This has been exacerbated by opacity concerning large-scale land acquisitions in which even African state governments are complicit. For example, in March, demonstrations in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone by local communities and NGOs condemned displacement and land grabbing by industrial palm oil and rubber plantations company Socfin, a holding company of the Paris-based Bollore group. In April 2012, sixty women of the Amuru District in Northern Uganda stripped naked before officials of the Madhvani Group of Companies to protest against the company’s attempts to evict residents from the land in order to grow sugarcane.

There is much discord among scholars about the severity and scope of land dispossession on the continent. Some assert that the African “land grabs” are not nearly as extensive as advocacy organizations report, while some activists describe the phenomenon as a “silent re-colonization.” Clashes between corporate representatives and rural Africans as well as widespread, unlawful displacement of people across the continent are nonetheless indicative of the need to formally adjudicate such crimes and create more transparency around land deals.