OREANDA-NEWS. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague on Tuesday, October 12, received a lawsuit against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro: the Austrian environmental organization AllRise accuses the populist politician of crimes against humanity in connection with the large-scale deforestation of the Amazon. This is the first lawsuit openly linking forest destruction with the loss of human lives.

The lawsuit says that the Bolsonaro administration is responsible for the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest with an area of 4 thousand square kilometers per year, while the pace has increased by 88% during Bolsonaro's reign. «Bolsonaro systematically weakens and repeals laws and control mechanisms and takes targeted measures against environmentalists. Bolsonaro's actions are directly related to the negative consequences for the climate around the world», the document emphasizes.

According to activists, the rapid forest destruction in the Amazon and the resulting further global warming will lead to the death of more than 180 thousand people worldwide in the current century. The amount of greenhouse gases from forest fires and industrial agriculture in the Amazon exceeds the annual emissions in Italy or Spain. Deforestation in this region already leads to the emission of more CO2 than the remaining forests in the Amazon are able to absorb.

«What is happening in the Amazon is massive forest destruction, and we want to understand the causal relationship of this with global warming. This is how the Roman status defines the concept of a crime against humanity: the deliberate destruction of nature and its defenders», AllRise founder Johannes Wesemann said in an interview with AFP.