The United Nations’ highest court ruled on Wednesday that countries have an obligation to protect people from the “existential threat” of climate change. It marked the first time the International Court of Justice has officially weighed in on the issue, and ends a campaign begun in 2019 by law students from low-lying Pacific island countries.
Based on countries’ obligations under the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the high court president Judge Iwasaw Yuji wrote that failing to rein in emissions and work to slow warming constitutes an “internationally wrongful act.” The Court has no enforcement mechanism in place, but enshrining the principle in international law may still ripple out into legal proceedings around the world.
“The World Court’s stunning opinion could be a major watershed for climate law and climate justice in the U.S. and worldwide,” said Jean Su, a senior attorney at the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. In what experts described as unusually specific wording, the Court specifically noted that production, consumption, or subsidies for fossil fuels may fall into that “wrongful act” category, and it opened the door to countries suing other countries over their related actions. “The court enshrined a healthy, sustainable environment as a human right and it singled out the failure of governments to curb fossil fuel production and consumption as a wrongful act,” Su said. “This decision gives moral and legal heft to all of us around the world fighting for the swift transition off fossil fuels.”
The case was led by the small country of Vanuatu, and joined by many others. In December of last year, the Court’s 15 judges heard arguments from hundreds of representatives. “I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity,” said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate and the environment, in his statement to the court. “Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned.”
The primary “wrongful actor” these days is, of course, the US. Donald Trump has once again begun the process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and domestically has set about trying to take the concept of “climate action” and do literally the exact opposite. It may be an uphill climb to make it stick, but there is now an international mandate that such actions should give other countries harmed by climate change access to “full reparation to injured States in the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction.”
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