Title: Reconsidering International Criminal Law’s Future: Corporations, Climate Change, and AI

Visiting Speaker: Mark A. Drumbl - Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director, Transnational Law Institute, Washington and Lee University
Date: September 28, 2026

International criminal law has traditionally focused on prosecuting individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression. This talk argues that the framework is increasingly ill-suited to address emerging global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, corporate power and artificial intelligence.

It explores how these threats challenge existing concepts of criminal responsibility and evidence, particularly as AI reshapes how truth is created, verified and contested. The presentation considers whether international law must evolve beyond traditional criminal justice models to better promote human rights, security and global well-being.

Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director, Transnational Law Institute, at Washington and Lee University. A Canadian national, he has held visiting appointments and has taught at law schools world-wide, including Queen’s University Belfast, Oxford University (University College), Free University of Amsterdam, University of Melbourne, University of Ottawa, Masaryk University (Czechia), and John Cabot University in Rome. His work has been relied upon by national and international courts; he has served as defense lawyer in Rwandan genocide trials; co-authored an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court in the Ongwen case; and has been an expert in litigation including on international terrorism, with the UN in matters involving child soldiers, and with the UN Human Rights Council in the drafting of a global convention to criminalize racist hate speech. His books include Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (Cambridge 2007), Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford 2012), and Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford 2024, with Barbora Holá); and co-edited volumes Research Handbook of Child Soldiers (Elgar 2019, with Jastine Barrett),  Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions (Brill 2024, with Caroline Fournet), Children and Violence (Routledge 2024, with Christelle Molima and Mohamed Kamara et al), The Character of International Law (Bloomsbury, 2025, with Emma Breeze and Gerry Simpson), and Reframing Transitional Justice (Routledge 2026, with Kirsten Fisher). He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Criminal Law Review.

Podcast:

Transcript:

Untitled - November 11, 2026

00:00:00 Speaker 1: I would begin by acknowledging that Queen's University is situated on the traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. Um, and we're grateful to be able to live and learn here. We have today Mark Drumbl, who is a friend of Queen's Law. He's come here a few times now, haven't you? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Mark is, uh, he's at Washington and Lee University. He's the class of nineteen seventy five alumni professor. He's also the director of the Transnational Law Institute. He's a Canadian citizen, um, but has been in the US for a long time now. Yeah. And he's written a heap of books, including, uh, maybe my Favorite Atrocity Punishment and International Law. He's written a couple about child soldiers. Uh, he's written one about informers in Communist Prague. Prague, and, uh, one on the sights, sounds, and sensibilities of atrocity prosecutions. And Mark today is going to talk to us about reconsidering international criminal laws, future corporations, climate change and AI, which I believe has been officially renamed. Uh. Anyway, so come on up. There you go. 

Speaker 2: Okay, so it's really great to be back here. Thanks, Darryl. Thanks, Natalie. And, uh, thanks to all of you for coming and listening. As Darryl said, I, uh, have lived in the States for a while, but I grew up in Montreal, and I did all my degrees in Canada, moved to the States and stayed there. And there I am. But it always makes me extremely happy to come back. And as Darryl said, I have been to Queens on several occasions. I love Kingston and you all have a real, real gem of a university and a law school here and a real bunch of gems as faculty. So I hope you're all enjoying yourselves. All right. So as Darryl said, the project that I'm presenting today is entitled Reconsidering International Criminal Law's Future. Corporations, Climate change and AI. The piece is a thought piece essay. It's breezy and informal. It's slightly edgy and editorial. And it's also been accepted for publication. This is actually the last time I'm going to present it until it gets published, which means this is not a finale, but it's a good chance to try to get some input and ideas before it officially goes into press with the London Review of International Law. Okay, so let me take you by the hand and let me walk you through what I'm going to do. I'm going to start off and talk about a couple of postulates and presumptions, and then I'm going to talk to you about two sets of concerns that I have. And the sets of concerns are about the future, in particular, the kinds of threats that you all, in particular, are going to face over the course of your lifetimes, and concerns about the ability of law to deal with those. And then instead of ending with anxiety and concern, I don't think that's a great note on which to end. I want to end with some optimism, light and bright. So that's going to be the journey. So let's start off with some postulates. And the first is this. Following World War Two, an international legal imagination emerged. And this international legal imagination posited that the gravest threats to stability, security, sovereignty and human rights. This imagination posited that the greatest threats to those four important variables were what I would call crimes of hate often orchestrated through the states, but crimes of hate. What are crimes of hate, genocide, crimes against humanity. Systematic war crimes. The crime of aggression or illegal war, and the construction of those crimes. In many ways, propelled the development of international criminal law and far more broadly, liberal institutional internationalism. And it created what we would call the empire of law. This idea, as David Kennedy writes in The Dark Sides of Virtue, this idea that law is our friend and politics is our enemy, that politics causes problems and law brings solutions. Liberal legalism is a way forward to a better place and this has created a superstructure. It has created international institutions. It has created international criminal tribunals, the International Criminal Court. But mostly what it has created is a mindset and a mindset among international lawyers that these crimes and their prosecution will serve purposes of threat reduction, harm reduction and promote human rights, stability, security, and national sovereignty. And this international legal imagination, sure, its institutions are weak. They're currently failing, and they're currently at least flailing. There are problems with international penal legalism. These have been documented extensively, including by Darryl and many other scholars. International criminal law is too selective. It's too arcane. It focuses on punctual ism and actualism instead of the longitudinal nature of harms. It doesn't really deter. It's too simplistic. It casts victims as passive and perpetrators as abnormal. It's got all these flaws, but still there's a tremendous normative capture by international penal legalism that still remains and persists even when the current international order as it is now, is subject to challenge. But this is the past and the present. I don't want to rehash the strengths and weaknesses, the possibilities and perils of international legalism. What I want to do is talk to you about the future. Future challenges. And here my central argument is that the weaknesses and shortcomings of international criminal law, as they are today, will only grow as there will be a growing mismatch between what international criminal law can do and what the future threats are that you all are going to face over the course of your lifetimes. And as you can guess from the title of the paper, the three major sets of future threats or climate change, unfettered corporate power and artificial intelligence. So what I want to do for the remainder of these remarks is approach this through two conceptual frames. The first is what are the harms of the future and who will the harm doers be? And here what I would like to talk about is harm, doers and harms such as climate change and pandemics, corporations and artificial intelligence. And then a second part of concerns that I have relate to operational concerns. Let's say that the harms of artificial intelligence, climate change and corporations can fit into a courtroom. Let's say we manage to shoehorn them in the box of criminal law. There. My concerns are operational, namely, can law handle this? And here, once again, I have concerns about artificial intelligence. And then I have concerns about social media. Attention spans. And what I see as the diminishing role of law generally. And then, as I said, I want to conclude on an optimistic note, when something doesn't work or doesn't work so well anymore. You can bemoan it. You can get upset. You can get sad. Or you can do what human beings have done since time immemorial. You can get inventive and creative and change. And that's the note on which I'd like to end. But my fundamental thread is the concern that I have, that this quest to transform extremely complex quandaries into simplistic legal responses. Here my concern is that criminalization. This central element of international criminal law. The courtroom ification of these harms is already flailing, and I think will become all the more failing when we have an honest conversation of what our future threats are. This mismatch, I fear, will grow. So let's start off with the first basket. Conceptual questions harm and harm doers. First one climate change. I'll put pandemics in this as well. It is very difficult to deny the atrocity levels of certain pandemics, including one we came out of five years ago. They will be back and it is very difficult to deny the effects of climate change. That in turn will have immense stability, security, sovereignty and human rights concerns. However, unlike these classic crimes of hate, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression, climate change is not driven by intentional human mens rea behavior. It's not driven by malevolence. It's not driven by cruelty. It's not driven by sadism. It is driven by carelessness, desperation, wanting to put food on the table, wanting to see loved ones, wanting to raise your children in a better way. Climate change is driven by small additions of human behavior on a daily basis. It is not driven by the same motives that drive genocide. Similarly with pandemics, the spread of pandemics is not driven by intentional malevolence. It's driven by carelessness, desperation, economic needs. You got to get to work these kinds of things. So how do classic international criminal lawyers approach things like the threats of climate change and the threats of pandemics? They go to their traditional reflex to criminalize. But they criminalize only the most extreme forms of this particular behavior. So an international criminal law, we have this crime of ecocide, ecocide that is emerging. Daryl and I've spoken about this criminalizes intentional infliction of destruction to the environment because you intentionally want to destroy the environment. It riffs off of genocide, ecocide. You want to murder the environment. The percentage of environmental harms that are caused by Ecocidal motivations is diminutive. It's a tiny fraction of the aggregated problems that phenomena like climate change present. Similarly, how many people intentionally spread pandemic or disease? I grew up in the nineteen eighties, the HIV Aids pandemic. The percentage of people who intentionally spread HIV Aids was diminutive. Similarly in Covid. But criminal lawyers therefore focus on this most spectacular form, the most malevolent form of the violence. But it doesn't actually deter ninety nine percent of the problem, because ninety nine percent of these problems is not occasioned by mens rea. And if the criminal law expands to cover these serious threats, such as climate change, what will it have to do? It will lead to vast overcriminalization. We all have to completely lower and reduce mens rea and intentionality standards to literally imprison everyone for their contribution to these collective crimes and personally extensive Overcriminalization is something of which I have great concern. As you all should. So here we have this paradox, the collective nature of these major threats, in particular climate change, just don't fit into a criminal courtroom. So what do we do? We can try to squeeze it in and create some vastly over criminalized society, or we can step back. The second conceptual concern that I have is capitalism and corporations under international criminal law. Right now, there is no criminal liability for corporate entities profit. There is no international criminal tribunal that has any jurisdiction over criminal entities. And this is by design. It didn't just happen. It was created that way. It was created that way in large part because delegates to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and other delegates involved in the creation of the ad hoc international tribunals, wanted the institution to get up and running and to have conversations about corporations as defendants proved so intractable that what ended up happening was the easier road was taken to only vest jurisdiction in individuals. Period. I also think we need to appreciate the extent to which international criminal law is wedded to transnational capitalism. The constant search for donor support, the constant search for legitimacy, creates a space in which the revolutionary potential of international criminal law is not as large as one might think. This leads to an odd paradox. For example, in the United States, the United States Supreme Court decision called Jesner. What is jesner involved? It involves the question whether corporations can be defendants in lawsuits in the United States under a statute called the Alien Tort Statute, which creates tort remedies for customary international law violations domestically. In most jurisdictions, corporations can be sued in tort. United States Supreme Court, however, ruled in the Jesner case that because international criminal law does not recognize corporations as defendants. This statutory framework would not work to sue corporations for tort damages. Ironically, the content of international criminal law here didn't serve as an accelerant for domestic liability. It actually served as a decelerate or a retardant in this place. It was not at all catalytic. And the point of the matter is, if we are truly to have conversations, in my view, about corporate liability for international crimes, corporations as harm doers. Corporations are extensive harm doers, in my view. Fancifully, to hope that international criminal law can step into this space is utopian. Rather, in my view, Corporate liability for grievous conduct will have to happen at the national level, and is something that can only happen through revolution, through a serious rewriting of domestic criminal codes and domestic corporate law in a way that bumps us off of the unbridled spread of market based capitalism as a political economy worldwide. I think it is fair to say we have never had in the world a lower level of diversity of political economy than we have right now. We're basically neoliberal, market based capitalism is everywhere here. However, there's a further concern, which is the growing twist and torsion of monopoly capitalism, massive transnational corporations that in many ways have more authority than many states have. Many of these corporations in, particularly in the tech industry, are working actively to literally create their own city states that they themselves write the penal codes for. Sure. We've always had the Dutch East Indies Corporation. We've always historically had a variety of mercantilist colonialist enterprises. But these entities are not only truly global in nature, they also are insulated in many ways from any nation state and the pressures of any nation state. Hence, I think to actually have a conversation of corporations is wrongdoers. If we rely on international criminal law in this space, it presents the lure of an easy solution. But I think it just leads to nothingness. It's a distraction, and it diverts attention from truly what might be a way forward. Last, are there some signs of positivity with regards to corporate liability? Yes there are. But where are they coming from? They're not coming from international institutions. They're coming from national courts. For example, quite recently, a very interesting case out of France, the Lafarge case under the French Criminal Code, actually held a major French corporation and its officers responsible in penal law and in tort law for endemic involvement with the Islamic State in Syria and the perpetration of a wartime economy. There was no reference in those judgments to international law whatsoever. In fact, referencing it would almost have decelerated the process. Similarly, the cruelty of the economic warfare of United States tariff policies now has elicited zero response from any international institution. The only institution that has stood up to that is the national courts in the United States, the United States Supreme Court. And that's it. And I think for us to invest in internationalism as a tool against corporate power is misguided. Last artificial intelligence, AI. This is sort of the third future conceptual challenge that I feel we have. Sure. Drones are now central to the commission of war. We all know that. We've seen that starting mostly in Ukraine, but also elsewhere. But drones are just the tip of the iceberg. We're really on the cusp of fully autonomous weapon systems, weapon systems that fight on their own without the need for any human involvement. Killer robots are no longer Fantasia. They're about to be reality. Criminal law interfaces very queasily with robots and artificial intelligence. Why? Because at the end of the day, there's a tremendous problem of attribution. How do you attribute from the human, from the programmer, the designer, the button pusher that works for drones? I'm not so sure that works for autonomous weapon systems that just defend an attack on their own. If criminal law is required to regulate AI and robots, we are going to have tremendous problems of attribution because criminal law only puts human beings in the dark. As AI becomes even more agentic, as AI becomes even more additive, even more algorithmic, the differences between AI decision making and human decision making will grow to such an extent that humans no longer. Unless you have the most over criminalized and attenuated theories of responsibility. In my view, human beings no longer will be able to be accountable for what happens and what happens when AI self preserves itself through violence. What happens when AI resists attempts to shut it down or redirect it? It's been a series of experiments that have been had when AI has been tasked with environmental protection. What's one of the major recommendations? Kill all people. It's undeniable. We'll go back to climate change. Human beings are responsible for an enormous level of environmental desecration. So it's very difficult for me to conceptualize that as violence and warfare becomes all the more autonomous and AI ified, that criminal law can serve any kind of a regulatory deterrent role in this particular capacity. In fact, in this paper, I argue that maybe one of the last gasps with regards to the regulation of AI in warfare is to adopt a view of AI similar to what happened in the nineteen twenties, and then for decades afterwards, when, for example, chemical weapons as tools of war were seen as so violative of customary norms, that they were just banned outright as inherently discriminatory in the sense that, I'm sorry, I misspoke as inherently nondiscriminatory In that they failed to discriminate between civilians and combatants. I think an argument can be made that AI, even if it has discriminatory, you know, distinctive potential, that it is too inhumane to assign the ability to kill someone entirely to a machine, that the humanity requirement of the laws of war requires that in order to kill someone in combat, it has to be a person who somehow does that. So this is a side piece of this and actually a separate project I'm I'm working on. But that has nothing to do with criminal law. That just has to do with banning a particular way of researching, not necessarily prosecuting those who may depart from the ban. I told you I also had a second basket. Then I'll wrap up. Those are operational challenges. So we've got our three major future harms. Can criminal law deal with these? I'm skeptical. Maybe you're not. We can talk about it, and I'd like to learn. But let's say we shoehorn all this in. How does that look operationally? And I think the operation of criminal law faces two major challenges in the future. The first involves AI. And that's AI and the laws of evidence. For a long time, human beings have relied on their senses. We've relied on our senses and our intuition to separate fact from fiction, to identify the counterfeit, to spot the liar. We've relied on our senses to do that. And we've been pretty good at it. Sure, some people got away with forging da Vinci's. But by and large, the counterfeiters, the forgers, the liars they got caught. By and large. My concern is AI ability to produce disinformation, misinformation and deepfakes is so powerful that it will overwhelm the human sensory capacity to identify fact and separate fact from fiction to identify the liar. When that happens, it deeply imperils our laws of evidence, because our laws of evidence rely on people judges to differentiate truth from falsity. One response to this, of course, is to say we can develop good AI to determine the falsity and deepfakes, disinformation and misinformation of bad AI. But if we do that, then we have a criminal justice system rooted entirely in AI, in which there's no people sitting there like you right in front of me as a judge. Is that a credible legal system? Will that be seen as credible? Do we want to outsource all this to AI? I'm not so sure. But bad AI is smart and bad AI learns from good AI, and generally in the AI world, the good AI is always going to have to run behind the bad AI. So I'm not even certain that this would work. I think we can have other responses to this. I presented this elsewhere and someone said, we don't need to worry about identifying truth from fiction and fact, because soon we're all going to have mind reading technology. I'm going to have a chip, you're going to have a chip, and I'm going to look at you. I know exactly what you're thinking right now. I don't want to live in that world. To me, that's the ultimate dystopia. And in that world, you don't need any law at all anyway. So this is one concern I have. Even if all of these concerns fit in the box of law, can law process it? And we're already beginning to see this. This friend of mine sent me a preliminary motion in an ICC case. The Duterte case involves the crime against humanity of sort of killing people in a domestic drug war in the Philippines. And one of the defense motions says the prosecution has adduced so much evidence, so much papers, all generated through algorithmic searches, so much stuff that is so overwhelming that they don't have the ability to go through it all through humans and determine what is relevant, what is irrelevant. We're just in this algorithmic production stage of everything being so overwhelming that I wonder whether it will just crush the process of law. Last social media. It's my second operational concern and my last of my five concerns. I fear we're in a space where law is confirmatory and we have a demise of the importance of verdict and judgment. Right now, I feel and fear that law revolves around the accusation that revolves around the J'accuse. You're charged with something. That becomes galvanizing and in the end, concerns years later over. Verdict and judgment are far less important than they once were. Here, I think social media is an immense accelerant in this particular regard. And this leads me to this greater concern that I have. You all study law. One of the things about law is supposed to be an independent variable. It's supposed to change our minds. It's supposed to have us view things differently than we would have viewed them before. And we all hope as law Students and his law professors and his law practitioners that were working in a space where what we contribute is an independent variable. But let me ask you this. As you all know, the International Court of Justice has been seized through South Africa with deciding on whether there is genocide occurring in Gaza or not. So let's run with this as a thought experiment. Let's say the International Court of Justice rules that there is genocide in Gaza. Here's my question. Will anyone who does not think there is genocide in Gaza sit back and say, yeah, the International Court of Justice said there's genocide in Gaza, so therefore I'm going to change my mind. I don't think so. I think people who don't think there's genocide in Gaza, if the court rules, there's genocide in Gaza, are simply going to say, oh, wow, those judges are these crazy activists. They have no idea what's going on. Obviously, people who think the exact opposite. Let's say that people who think there's genocide in Gaza and let's say the International Court of Justice rules there is no genocide in Gaza. We've examined the law, we've applied the law, and the facts don't meet up to that. Does anyone who thinks that there's genocide in Gaza or any of those people going to step back and say, oh, yeah, I changed my mind. I read the whole judgment, and guess what? I changed my mind. I don't think so. What are they going to say? They're going to say that all these judges are these imperialist retreads and have no idea about the pain of the people. Which leads me to a broader concern that I have. If law on these big questions doesn't change people's minds, then the rule of law is purely confirmatory to what we believe before we turn to legal process to putatively solve problems. So in a sense, this means that international criminal law is confirmatory of pre-existing bias as opposed to changing. And I think if we're in this space, then we can accept and expect even fewer results in the future if we rely on this penal law paradigm to attempt to deal with the biggest future concerns that we have about stability, sovereignty, human rights. So to wrap up, as an international criminal lawyer speaking to people interested in international criminal law, my advice is that international criminal lawyers should put down their tools and should pause, take a breath, not respond to every future challenge by saying that additively international criminal law can do more and more and more, and not necessarily bemoan the demise of international criminal law as a methodology of international dispute resolution. Maybe we should break up our relationship with international criminal law as emancipatory and as salvation. Maybe we should take David Kennedy seriously. My fundamental concern is that continuing to tinker with international criminal law as a supposed solution creates what Rosa Luxemburg has called or had called revolutionary undermining reform. Some reform truly undermines revolution. Some reform truly undermines change and is distracting. And I think she is right on this writing in a very different context. So as a result, I think we should reconsider what it is that we're doing. I think we should revisit ourselves. As I've written elsewhere, I think we should get over our abstemiousness for radical thinking. I think we should overcome our intrinsic conservatism as international criminal lawyers and engage in a broader, ranging self-awareness. And in the end, what I would like to do, I think, is for us to redirect our vision of the international legal imagination from a crime centered vision to a harm centered vision. And if we focus on harm instead of crime, I think the natural outcome is a far greater diversity of solutions, conversations and outcomes. So that's the thought piece. And thank you for your time. What she just said at the outset as well, for the folks on Zoom, there's a, oh, you're getting applause Mark here. Oh, good. Uh, um, for the folks watching on Zoom, you can also feel free to put questions into the chat if you'd like. Um, does anyone here I could offer the room up if anyone has any questions. Uh, if not, I can cook one up already. Uh, yeah. Um, um, I guess I'm curious what you what direction you would go. So I agree with you that international criminal law is not going to be useful about climate change and corporate power. Um, and I probably wasn't realizing what direction you were going to go at the end because I thought I've heard versions of this criticism before. Oh, international criminal law. It's not good at A, B, C, d e. And I'm like, that's okay. Um, there's lots of stuff. Every tool is bad at lots of things, right? Um, so a magnetic resonance imager is really good for, but MRIs, they're terrible. They're not going to help with corporate power. And MRIs aren't going to help with climate change. But we're not going to get rid of MRIs. Right. They're great at scanning. So, um, um, but then you took a turn as I are you just saying international criminal law should stay in its lane or or what? What's your prescription going forward? First of all, I think just staying in its lane would be a major shift for international criminal law because as you know, for the past twenty years, international criminal law has just tried to do more and more and more and more and more. Right. The regulatory expansion has been on, you know, everything from child soldiers pillage. Now we've got the environmental crimes. It just expands and expands cultural property, all of these things. So I think already there's a natural tendency to just be so additive and accretive and do more and more and more. So I think simply stopping that would already be a step forward. And again, that's separate from conversations about how precarious the field is now. You know, in a sense, talking about reconsidering international criminal law in this moment can also be sort of seen as the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, because the field is under so much pressure from the multipolarity of political realism and a rapidly shifting international order that I don't think in any way, shape or form is leading to better days. Right. So let me be clear about that. But I think that presents an opportunity to honestly recognize that. this particular capturing of the imagination that has been deeply invested in for the past eighty years, I think, needs to be rebooted in order not only to address these future challenges that don't fit in the courtroom. I also think it needs to be rebooted to recognize the reality that I'm not sure that some of the core pillars, like we talked about last night, I'm not sure that some of the core pillars of the United Nations system are sustainable at all. Probably the major Achilles heel of the United Nations system is the Security Council and the permanent members on it. And in fact, there's enormous numbers of people in the world who live in states that recognize it as fundamentally illegitimate, that their states are not on this sort of permanent five. So I think this is actually an opportunity to go beyond staying in the lane. I think it is really an opportunity to rethink what harm is, what inclusiveness is, what justice is, and to recognize that courtroom ification, it looks great. It's theatrical. There's the imagery of Nuremberg. I mean, it's got this appeal, but I think we vastly exaggerated what this can actually do. And if we take the courtroom and amplify it to cover these threats, we end up in a complete system of overcriminalization. And this always surprises me about international criminal law. So almost all human rights activists in international criminal law are on the side of the prosecution. I've done criminal defense in cases of genocide. Criminal defense at international criminal law is the loneliest place to be. Absolutely. It's the most underfunded, but it's also the loneliest. Criminal defense lawyers and international criminal law are seen as absolute pariahs. All the human rights groups are on the side of the prosecution. All of them. And I always find this very surprising because in Canada, I'd say in all European countries, and especially in the United States, where the penal system is very heavy handed, all the human rights groups are on the side of the defense. There are no other than a few victims groups, and that's even split. All human rights groups in the United States who care about the criminal law are on the side of the defense. Domestically, the criminal law is seen as coercive and problematic, perpetrating discrimination and perpetrating in many, many ways, lack of an equal playing field, but we don't see that in international criminal law. The prosecutors are the heroes. So one thing that I do worry about is I don't think it's implausible that if conditions were to change and a feeling was had, that things like climate change and pandemics and AI and corporations could somehow fit into the criminal framework, I think that could quite realistically lead to a broader sense of overcriminalization. And I don't think that's entirely Discountable do I think it's likely? No. I think what's likely is we'll only focus on this tiny slice of wrongdoing. That's the most egregious think we're doing something. And then at the end of the day, we're actually really doing barely anything at all. And to me, that's that's the greatest danger. So I think there's other institutions that can play more important functions that we talk about very little. For example, the International Court of Justice just issued an advisory opinion on climate change. I think there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that leads to notions of state responsibility. The problem with ecocide and international criminal law is you target the most extreme person that might be intentionally causing climate change. But at the end of the day, not only is that a tiny percentage of the overall harm, it also obscures the fact that right now there is no jurisdiction, there is no state, there is no country that is doing anything remotely effective to actually deal with climate change. There's none. Zero. And at least this state responsibility within the frame of the International Court of Justice. This area of thinking about tort, thinking about other methodologies of law, I think can have those kinds of conversations. Yeah, yeah. You're the judge sitting right in the middle there. The, um, how do you see this in the context of Third World trying to develop itself in sort of like a torts based analysis? How can I say that country X in Africa is giving a talk on the rest of the world by using coal as its primary method or primary origin of energy. How do you work that into the system, especially nowadays with all the Nobel laureates work on. Right. So I think you what what what you raise is an extremely important question in international environmental law and global environmental governance. And this is something that I've in other work have called the shared compact. It's the shared compact between, uh, Northern interests and southern interests. So, for example, take article forty seven of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. It has a provision and it's replicated in the Biodiversity Convention. It's it's replicated in the Desertification Convention, and it's replicated in the Vienna Convention on the ozone layer and the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer. So article forty seven of the Efcc, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, has a provision that says any developing nation commitments under the Treaty Oak are made conditional on financial resource transfer and technology transfer from the developed states. And this convention has an annex afterwards on who is classified as the developed or developing state. Right. And the states in the developing box is it. It includes enormous disparities like South Korea and Malawi. They're very difficult to compare. Put that in nitpicking to the side. It divides these in two. And your question goes to the heart of this moral conundrum in international environmental regulation and climate change, namely, climate change is a problem because the states of the global North industrialized. Externalize the costs of all of those externalities onto the global environment and then beginning to bring in restrictions. Now presents the moral problem of not allowing the global South to industrialize in the same way as the global north, and therefore having severe economic consequences on future generations in the global South. Now, we haven't seen this play out because international environmental law is largely toothless. All right. But I'm with you on this. This is why I think there's a danger in criminalizing things like climate change. Why? Because the most spectacular failures, the most egregious examples of states and actors failing, who fail to properly regulate, who are complicit in terrible environmental calamities, who are the most involved in serious loss of life. They're going to be actors in the global South. And as a result, criminalizing climate change, criminalizing ecocide, I think, is going to have the exact effect that concerns you. And it's no different than the effects of international criminal law. Now, the powerful human rights abusers don't get criminally prosecuted. Look at who's getting prosecuted at the international criminal courts. Actually prosecuted, not indicted, not arrest warrant, but actually brought in and Then prosecuted. So almost overwhelmingly, leaders of rebel groups who lose conflicts in the global South, in particular Africa, deposed leaders in the developing world and so forth. So I think this is a real concern. So I really appreciate your point on that. Right. Which suggests that to adequately thread this moral obligation, I don't think the penal law can do it. And Canada's influence in Africa with its mining interests there. Um, would you say that Canada has a responsibility from obviously like a neocolonial extraction pattern emerging of providing technology and providing industrial, not industrialization, but providing road structure, etc.. Do you think that in a court system, for example, a country coming in to extract resources has a duty to the sovereignty of the nation they're extracting to? So I think that's a great question. And uh, you know, I don't know details about the Canadian mining industry. I do know details of the Canadian mining industry. The talisman Company, which was prosecuted, uh, sued in tort under the alien tort statute in the United States for its involvement in Africa. What I think maps entirely onto my earlier remarks. I don't think one can just use the passive tense and the passive voice to say, the Canadian state out there. Owes some obligation to, you know, uh, people living in places where Canadian or any national extractive industry is located. You owe the responsibilities, the citizens of the country itself. And this is my other concern with relying on these abstract notions of international criminal law and robes in The Hague, you know, on The Hague stage, to try to deal with these issues. At the end of the day, I think the only entity that can push corporate responsibility for putatively criminal conduct are citizens of states to vote in elected officials who amend national codes. You know, the what's it in Canada? I remember I went to law school in Canada, the CBC, the Canadian. What's the. That's it. See, I remembered the acronym. Right. You know, in Ontario has one too, right? So yeah, that's it. Right. I went to law school in Ontario. Right. See, I still remember some stuff that's going to produce their results. That's where it is. And I worry that these international institutions that occasionally do some high profile case, then everyone's like, oh, you know, something happened. So I don't need to. And I think by recognizing that this this distraction of international criminal law doesn't fit, I think puts the pressure back onto the shoulders of what Rosa Luxemburg would sort of say is, you know, revolution promoting reform. So I think that's where it is. And actually, the only space where we see this a little bit is at the national level of courts regulating their own corporations, like the the Lafarge case in France, for example. That's a great example. Sure. I'm taking a lot of time. No, no, no. That was high school student in France when the case came to be. That was a huge thing. So I had two questions actually on the on your other point, it was, uh, so how do you see the erosion of the electoral system in Canada and the individualization of people? Like we're going to a more social question here because you said that people are actually the driving factor of redistributing wealth back to the developing countries. Right. How do you see the erosion of the voter base in North America? The primary base of neo colonial expansion, like impacting this whole process of, for example, the creation of a harm international court instead of a criminal international court? Well, I think, you know, on all of this corporate liability, I think you would all do well to go back and read Adam Smith and read the original works like Smith Ricardo, the original works on the invisible hand on the theory of comparative comparative advantage. And a lot of those works were written with great skepticism of, you know, these massive colonial enterprises, like the Dutch East Indies Corporation or, you know, the British corporations and the French in this regard that were felt to be so closely aligned to the state. And when you read this original stuff, you actually see this immense synergy between individual rights, individual autonomy, and a notion of a society in which there are hundreds of thousands of enterprises, small scale businesses that move from status to contract as the way to affirm, you know, not only a vibrant society, but also to have your word taken seriously and to be able to exchange through a monetised economy. I think if these original this original vision of capitalism is very beautiful. Did it happen? No. It became overrun with monopoly Capitalism in ways that I think is even worse than the Dutch East Indies Corporation. And I have a picture in the article, for example, of a building in London on one side of the Thames, where there's a UK flag on the building, and then there's a flag of shell on the building, you know, as Royal Dutch Shell. And it used to be that to some extent, these big mercantilist corporations fell under some power of the king or the state. But modern global capital doesn't at all, at all. And at the end of the day, to go back to your question, I think the original capitalism is very similar, I think, to Marx and Engels, who would roll over in their grave at this what the Soviet Union turned out to be. Right? So I think the answer to all of this is political reform at the national level, outside of courts. And that's the problem with the vision of liberal legalism. For generations we've been socialized that politics is evil and law is beautiful, but law is just an acolyte. And that's why I'm really drawn to David Kennedy and his work to say that maybe politics is also emancipatory. And I think there's a lot of reasons why, you know, maybe law has this allure. But I think I think that there is a space to re-engage with a progressive politics in this regard. And I think for too long, progressives have turned to courts to get what they want as opposed to politics. But there's limits to what law can bring. And I think we're it's coming up on that now. I'm not so. But thank you for all your comments.