The development of criminology has shifted the struggle for human rights to a ‘green’ hue. As a growing concept, the value of ecocide has yet to be accepted by various countries, both nationally and regionally. The international criminal law system has not formally accommodated the idea of ecocide. This paper aims to strengthen conceptual investigation in legal science, specifically examining the causes of the non-adoption to date of the proposed amendment to the Rome Statute to include a definition of ecocide as the fifth core crime. We employ legal epistemology, drawing on philosophical, synchronic, and diachronic approaches, to demonstrate how a significant phenomenon can become incorporated into legal rules. This paper serves as a vital guide to revealing how the contextualisation of aspects of environmental damage has a considerable influence on indicating the threat of ecocide. The results suggest that national-level sociological, cultural, economic, and political factors significantly influence differences in standards for environmental damage and the vulnerability of groups that experience social casualties. We argue that the amendments’ stalled progress of the Rome Statute is part of a weak understanding of the process of internalising facts and events into international law. For this reason, we strongly recommend support from International Criminal Court (ICC) member countries, including legal experts, in constructing the juridical limits of ecocide indicators that are generally accepted and follow applicable principles of international law.
Employing a critical-analytical approach, this article examines the environmental crisis not merely as a technical-managerial problem, but as the consequence of an ontological fissure in the definition of the ‘human.’ Within the dominant discourse, the ‘consumerist subject’ is posited as the natural form of humanity—a subject that defines its identity through a logic of lack, possession, and the gratification of desire. In opposition, drawing upon the thought of Ayatollah Javadi Amoli, this study proposes the concept of the Ḥayeh Motaleh (Divine-Lived Being) as a philosophical project for deconstructing this subject. By instituting 3 fundamental ruptures—a shift from ownership to vicegerent trusteeship, from appetitive-driven motion to a teleological trajectory of perfection, and from atomic individuality to a relational selfhood anchored in divine origin and return—the H.ayeh Motaleh posits an alternative ontology. Within this framework, responsibility toward nature and others is displaced from the periphery of ethics to the very core of existence, becoming an ontological responsibility—an essential, constitutive attribute of the H.ayeh Motaleh’s being, not merely a moral duty. Consequently, this perspective recasts the environmental crisis from an external predicament into a manifestation of an existential failure to realize humanity’s authentic potential as a Divine-Lived Being.
