Chile is at a turning point. The climate crisis, water shortages, wildfires and ecosystem degradation have highlighted the contradictions of an economic model based on the overexploitation of common goods. For decades, the national legal framework has prioritised investment and the speed of projects over the protection of life, leaving behind vulnerable communities and sacrificed territories.

The article “Chile’s Legal Architecture in the Face of International Advances in the Criminalisation of Ecocide” analyses this scenario in detail. It examines how Chilean legislation has moved from regulatory fragmentation and weak enforcement to the recent Law 21.595, which systematises economic crimes and incorporates, for the first time, a comprehensive definition of crimes with serious environmental impact. The law encompasses all the elements that comprise the international definition of ecocide, including its arbitrary nature, severity, extent, duration, and environmental impact. With this reform, Chile became the first South American country to take this step, opening the door to prison sentences for those responsible for massive environmental damage.

But this progress is not without tensions. While recognising the seriousness of attacks on nature, the state is also promoting regulations such as the Framework Law on Sectoral Authorisations, which speeds up investment projects by weakening environmental controls. Thus, the country is caught between two opposing forces: legislation that is beginning to recognise ecocide, and an extractivist model that continues to expand under legal protection.

The text also highlights the role of indigenous peoples, whose spiritual, political and territorial relationship with nature constitutes a different horizon from the extractivist paradigm. International instruments such as ILO Convention 169, the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Escazú Agreement oblige the state to guarantee their binding participation and the protection of their territories.

At the global level, the article traces the evolution of the concept of ecocide, from its denunciation in the Vietnam War to the legal definition proposed in 2021 by the Stop Ecocide Expert Panel. Recognising this crime as the fifth within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court – alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity – appears to be a crucial step in closing the gap between international commitments and local realities. In this scenario, Chile, as a State Party to the Rome Statute, has a responsibility to promote its incorporation into the International Criminal Court, which would provide a binding criminal standard at the global level and reinforce the coherence between its internal progress and its international commitments.

Recent opinions expressed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice reinforce this requirement: States have legal obligations in relation to the climate crisis and must protect nature as an indispensable condition for guaranteeing human rights.

Hence, the future depends on concrete decisions. Chile needs to strengthen oversight, advance mechanisms for the restoration of devastated ecosystems, recognise Nature as a subject of rights, and guarantee the effective participation of indigenous communities and peoples. Only then can the criminalisation of ecocide become a real tool against environmental impunity.

In short, the dilemma is clear: maintain a legal framework that legitimises the expansion of extractivism or move towards a new pact in which ecological justice is at the centre of democratic life. Criminalising ecocide is not a symbolic gesture; it is an ethical, political and legal urgency in the face of the magnitude of the civilisational crisis the world is currently experiencing.

© Chile sin Ecocidio