Mrinalini Shinde is a qualified lawyer with over 6 years of increasingly responsible PQE within environmental and climate change law. She is currently the Academic Manager for the International Master of Environmental Sciences degree programme at the University of Cologne. She is affiliated with the INGENIoS (Indo-German Network Interaction of Scientists) projects at the Environmental Law Center of the University of Cologne. Her previous role was as Legal Affairs Fellow at the UNFCCC secretariat in the treaty implementation, intergovernmental matters, and capacity-building streams. She has previously litigated cases in environmental and criminal law in India; and advised the climate media non-profit, ‘Climate Tracker Inc.’ as Policy Associate. She is the Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the renewable energy non-profit Student Energy, and an Associate Fellow at the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL).

It is wonderful to be a part of the GSSC’s network of researchers. The workshops, public lectures and conferences organized by the GSSC provide a crucial platform to center Global South questions within German academia. The GSSC also provides an important pathway for South-South cooperation among early career researchers for which I am grateful.

While there has been discussion on ecocide in legal literature since the 70s, the past decade has seen that ecocide consistently gaining traction within legal scholarship on environmental crime, green criminology, and international criminal law. As the international legal community seeks to push for the recognition of ecocide within international criminal law as a transboundary international crime, it is important to note that often if not always, ecocide involves corporate actors. This doctoral thesis seeks to examine the scope of the crime of ecocide in the context of corporations who are allegedly perpetrators. While existing criminal law and environmental law makes provisions for criminal penalties for specific violations, accusing corporations and holding them liable for the overarching crime of ecocide requires an evolved understanding of environmental harm and its victims, the reasoning behind the proposed inclusion of ecocide as an international crime, and the experience of national jurisdictions which have domestically criminalised ecocide in holding corporations criminally liable for it. The thesis is rooted in both green criminology, and law, specifically environmental law and criminal law at the domestic and international levels. The main aim of the dissertation is to expand our understanding of how corporations commit environmental crime, particularly the crime of ecocide as part of their operations, using both legal theory and empirical evidence, while incorporating methods from doctrinal research, comparative legal studies and green criminology.