If you’ve ventured out into the social media deluge over the last few days chances are you’ve seen your environmental activism-inclined friends and acquaintances post one of many articles with screaming headlines like…
Monsanto to Face Crimes Against Humanity Tribunal at International Criminal Court
…or…
Here are a few choice cuts from the latter:
If you’ve been waiting to finally see Monsanto — one of the most hated companies in the world — to pay for its ecocide, knowing harm of human life, and devastation of our pollinators, then you won’t have to wait much longer. Several activist groups joined by food and farming experts are suing Monsanto for their crimes against humanity…
The court, in The Hague, Netherlands, will use the UN’s ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ developed in 2011 to assess damages for Monsanto’s acts against human life and the environment…
This International Criminal Court, established in 2002 in The Hague, has determined that prosecuting ecocide as a criminal offense is the only way to guarantee the rights of humans to a healthy environment and the right of nature to be protected…
The proceedings will take place on World Food Day, October 16, 2016.
A certain set of individuals got themselves extraordinarily excited over this.
Alas, as Forbes‘ Kavin Senapathy gleefully pointed out, the whole story is a rubbish pile of activist PR and deceptive advertising:
While the verbiage sounds official, this tribunal is not governed by the United Nations nor the International Criminal Court, an international treaty-based court not affiliated with the UN. Instead, the group is using the guidelines of both for their trial, in a seeming attempt to lend authenticity to a glorified meeting of the who’s who of anti-biotech science deniers, during which they will undoubtedly find their absent defendant guilty.
Now, if the ICC wasn’t such a manifestly politicized body, no one would believe it would schedule an agribusiness show trial on World Food Day, or that it would place chasing biotech conspiracy theories above prosecuting actual crimes against humanity, or that after a spending ten years and more than a billion dollars to convict two obscure African warlords it would possess the gall to turn its attention to saving the entire biosphere.
But all of this struck the popular imagination of the cosmopolitan West as perfectly plausible and sensible. Which says as much about the ICC as it does about them — little of it flattering.