Polly Higgins left a career in law to pursue a question she believed the legal system had failed to answer: who should be held responsible when human activity severely harms the natural world? A Scottish barrister and author, she campaigned for ecocide to be recognised as an international crime. Her proposal did not become law during her lifetime, but her books, public advocacy and organising helped make the idea part of debate about the reach of international criminal law.
Glasgow, study and the Bar
Higgins was born Pauline Hélène Higgins in Glasgow on 4 July 1968 and grew up in Blanefield, Scotland. Her father had been a meteorologist during the Second World War and her mother was an artist. She attended St Aloysius’ College in Glasgow, then studied at the University of Aberdeen, Utrecht University and the University of Glasgow. During her university years, she collaborated with Austrian artist and environmental activist Friedensreich Hundertwasser; a later visit to Vienna brought her into contact with the European ecology movement.
After studying law at City University and the Inns of Court School of Law in London, Higgins was called to the Bar in England in 1998. She practised in London, specialising in corporate and employment law. The experience gave her a close view of legal processes, but it was a case involving a worker injured on the job that became a turning point. After three years representing the claimant, she recalled looking out from the Court of Appeal and thinking that the Earth, too, was being injured and needed a lawyer.
Higgins subsequently stopped practising as a barrister and committed herself to environmental advocacy. She wanted an international law that could make business executives and governments criminally liable for environmental harm. The shift was from arguing cases within existing legal rules to pressing for a change in what those rules recognised as a crime.
Making the case for ecocide
The idea of ecocide as an international crime was not new: it had been proposed among international crimes against peace in 1996, but was left out of the final Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Higgins began campaigning for its inclusion around 2009. In 2010, she argued that resource depletion and the destruction of ecosystems could contribute to conflict, and lobbied the United Nations Law Commission to recognise ecocide as an international crime. Her campaign sought to put grave environmental damage alongside crimes such as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in international law.
Higgins’s proposal centred on accountability. Rather than treating extensive ecological damage only as a matter for regulation or compensation, she wanted the law to reach those responsible for causing it. The intended consequence was to make governments and corporate decision-makers answerable for environmental harm. That was an argument for a new legal framework, not a claim that ecocide had already been established as an international crime.
She developed the case in Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of Our Planet (2010), setting out her proposed approach in book form as well as through campaigning. The book won the non-fiction award at the People’s Book Prize in 2011. In 2012, she delivered the Rachel Carson Memorial Lecture in London and the Netherlands, under the title “Ending the Era of Ecocide”. Her writing and public appearances gave legal and ethical arguments a wider audience, while keeping the specific goal of international criminal liability at the centre of her work.
Writing, advocacy and recognition
Higgins continued to publish beyond her first book on ecocide. Earth Is Our Business: Changing the Rules of the Game appeared in 2012, followed by I Dare You to Be Great in 2014. Her work also included a 2013 paper with Damien Short and Nigel South, “Protecting the planet: A proposal for a law of ecocide”, published in Crime, Law and Social Change. Together, these publications show the range of her approach: campaigning for a change in international law, explaining its purpose to a broad readership and contributing to legal debate.
She started the Earth Protectors group to raise funds for the ecocide campaign and was a founder of the Earth Law Alliance. These efforts gave supporters ways to organise around the proposal as well as hear its case. Higgins received several forms of recognition for her work. The Ecologist named her among its top ten visionary thinkers in 2009; she held the Arne Næss Professorial Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo in 2013–14; and in 2018 she received an honorary fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and its Shackleton Medal. She also received an honorary doctorate from Business School Lausanne in 2013.
Recognition did not mean the legal change she sought had been achieved. Higgins lobbied the United Nations Law Commission, but ecocide had not been recognised as an international crime by the time of her death. That distinction matters to the history of her campaign: its significance lies in the proposal she advanced and the discussion it sustained, not in a change to international criminal law that had not taken place.
Final years
After leaving Scotland, Higgins lived in London and later settled near Stroud. She married Ian Lawrie, a judge and Queen’s Counsel, in 2002. In March 2019 she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She died at a hospice in Leckhampton, Gloucestershire, on 21 April that year, aged 50, and was buried in Slad.
Her death did not resolve the question at the heart of her campaigning. The proposal to make ecocide an international crime remained unrealised, while the arguments she had made were preserved in books, legal writing and the organisations she helped establish. Her record is therefore both a personal story of a lawyer who changed direction and a continuing attempt to extend legal responsibility to severe damage to the environment.
Why Polly Higgins deserves a place in British Legacy
Polly Higgins deserves a place in British Legacy for the particular legal challenge she pursued: making severe environmental destruction a matter of criminal responsibility at international level. After training and practising as a barrister in England, she left the profession to argue for a new law that could hold governments and business decision-makers accountable. Her campaign did not achieve its central legal aim during her lifetime, and that limit should be part of her story. But she made a detailed case in public, through Eradicating Ecocide, later books, legal scholarship and lobbying of the United Nations Law Commission. The value of that work was to bring a concrete proposal into discussion rather than leave environmental protection as an abstract appeal to good intentions.
Her British connection is rooted in her Scottish upbringing and her professional and campaigning life in Britain, including her call to the Bar in England and her work with the Earth Protectors group and Earth Law Alliance. Her contribution also reached beyond national borders: she framed the question in international law and addressed audiences through lectures and writing. By recognising both her ambition and the fact that the proposed crime was not adopted during her lifetime, British Legacy can remember Higgins accurately—as a lawyer who devoted her later career to making environmental accountability a question for law, and who helped keep that question in view.
Sources
Adapted in part from Polly Higgins by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
