Healthy environment ruled a human right by world's top court, as campaigners hail ‘seismic' win
The opinion by the International Court of Justice was welcomed by campaigners as a 'turning point' and a 'seismic win' that sets a precedent for thousands of legal cases against governments and fossil fuel companies.
As judge Yuji Iwasawa delivered his opening remarks in The Hague on Wednesday, he warned of 'the urgent and existential threat posed by climate change' and said that greenhouse gas emissions are 'unequivocally caused by human activities which are not territorially limited.'
"Climate change treaties establish stringent obligations on states," he said, adding that failing to comply with them was a breach of international law.
"States must cooperate to achieve concrete emission reduction targets," Iwasawa said, as he read out the court's advisory opinion.
He said that national climate plans must be of the highest ambition and collectively maintain standards to meet the aims of the 2015 Paris Agreement that include attempting to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).
Under international law, he said: "The human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is essential for the enjoyment of other human rights."
"Failure of a state to take appropriate action to protect the climate system ... may constitute an internationally wrongful act,' he said.
Crowds had gathered outside the Peace Palace ahead of the ruling, chanting, 'What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!'
The ruling follows a legal campaign led by Vanuatu, which drew submissions from over 100 countries and organisations – making it the biggest case in the court's history.
The case asks judges to clarify countries' legal obligations to prevent climate crisis -related harm, and the consequences they could face for failing to act.
While the court's opinion is not legally binding, it is expected to influence future litigation and negotiations around the world, especially as countries prepare new national climate plans ahead of the COP30 summit in Brazil.
The 500-page opinion is being hailed as a turning point in the fight against climate inaction.
"Today, the tables have turned. The world's highest court provided us with a powerful new tool to protect people from the devastating impacts of the climate crisis — and to deliver justice for the harm their emissions have already caused," former UN human rights chief Mary Robinson said in a statement.
'This is a seismic win for climate justice,' said Christian Aid's global advocacy lead Mariana Paoli. 'The ICJ has made it crystal clear: big polluters can't dodge responsibility any longer.'
Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, said the court had reinforced the legal weight behind existing agreements. 'States have a responsibility to regulate private activity within their jurisdictions and they have a responsibility to all other states for the consequences of actions taken,' he said.
'This together means that countries have an obligation to limit, reduce and ultimately eliminate fossil fuel production.'
From Vanuatu, which spearheaded the case, ActionAid's country manager Flora Vano said: 'This ruling is a powerful tool we can use to demand that those most responsible for this climate crisis be held accountable.'
A panel of 15 judges was tasked with answering two questions: What are countries obliged to do under international law to protect the climate and environment from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions? Second, what are the legal consequences for governments when their acts, or lack of action, have significantly harmed the climate and environment?
Small island developing states (SIDS), who launched the push for the ICJ opinion, argue that existing frameworks such as the Paris Agreement do not go far enough in defining responsibility. They have asked the court to draw from human rights law, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the wider body of international law to set a clear legal standard.
'For the world's most vulnerable, the upcoming advisory opinion... is a milestone after decades of our calls for international accountability,' the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) said in a statement ahead of the ruling. 'This advisory opinion brings to bear the responsibility of countries to urgently accelerate climate action and safeguard vulnerable nations whose fundamental rights are debilitated by a crisis we did not cause.'
During the hearings, held in December last year, the court heard testimonies from almost 100 countries and 12 international organisations. Countries like Tuvalu and Zambia used their time before the court to detail the existential threats posed by sea-level rise and climate-linked drought.
'Tuvalu will not go quietly into the rising sea,' its delegation said.
In the decade up to 2023, sea levels rose by a global average of around 4.3 centimetres (1.7 inches), with parts of the Pacific rising higher still. The world has also warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times because of the burning of fossil fuels.
While countries like the UK and Germany argued that the Paris Agreement already provides sufficient legal direction, others – including France, Spain and many Global South nations – urged the court to go further.
The United States and Russia, both of whom are major petroleum-producing states, are staunchly opposed to the court mandating emissions reductions.
Spain cited the European Court of Human Rights ' recent ruling recognising that governments have human rights obligations in the face of the climate crisis, while France said the ICJ opinion could help clarify international law in the fight against climate impacts.
In its submission, Palau, the chair of AOSIS, presented evidence of 'worrying warming' in its waters and warned that high-end sea-level rise scenarios could leave large parts of the country underwater by 2100.
The opinion, AOSIS said, 'can make clear that countries' duties to live up to their commitments are irrefutable'.
AOSIS called the moment 'an opportunity to restore trust and correct a grave injustice,' urging countries to match the courage shown by climate-vulnerable nations with political will.
The ruling comes just a day after UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared that 'the fossil fuel age is flailing and failing' and called for 'deep, rapid, and sustained' emissions cuts.
'The clean energy future is no longer a promise. It's a fact,' Guterres said. 'Countries that cling to fossil fuels are not protecting their economies, they are sabotaging them.'
The ICJ's ruling will be advisory but carries symbolic and legal weight. Supporters of the case say the ruling could strengthen future climate lawsuits by grounding them more firmly in international law, and by making it harder for states to ignore climate harm that crosses borders.
Oxfam's Chiara Liguori said the opinion 'injects strong new impetus into negotiations at the COP30 Summit in Brazil this November' and urged wealthy nations like the UK to accept their legal obligations. 'This is not a wish list – it is international law,' she said.
With nearly 3,000 climate-related lawsuits filed globally across 60 countries, the ICJ's interpretation could shape how courts everywhere respond to future claims.
Lorenzo Cotula, principal researcher at IIED, said the court had delivered long-overdue legal clarity. 'The weight of evidence showing governments are legally obliged to fight climate change is now as overwhelming as the science showing how our planet is changing,' he said.
But Cotula also warned that international treaties protecting fossil fuel investments may obstruct progress. 'The system governing investor–state relations should be reformed as part of the response to climate change,' he said. 'The ICJ's advisory opinion provides a basis for that reform.'
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The Independent
4 hours ago
- The Independent
Trump's push for drilling, mining sharpens debate for Alaska Natives about land they view as sacred
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Native-run corporations — formed to benefit Alaska Native shareholders — are supporting a mine in southwestern Alaska that a regional tribal coalition opposes, a scenario similar to an oil exploration project underway in Interior Alaska. Trump singled out Alaska as a priority for extraction projects in an executive order signed on his first day in office. 'Unlocking this bounty of natural wealth will raise the prosperity of our citizens while helping to enhance our Nation's economic and national security,' the order said. Increasingly, words are turning to action. Congress, in passing Trump's budget bill in July, authorized an unprecedented four new sales of oil and gas leases in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and still more in other locations. Trump cabinet officials made a high-profile visit in June to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska's far north — an aging oil field that is one of the largest in North America. They touted goals of doubling the oil coursing through Alaska's existing pipeline system and building a massive natural gas pipeline as its 'big, beautiful twin.' Trump's policy shifts came even as he removed one of the most prominent Alaska Native names from the official map. He returned the federal name of 'Mount McKinley' to the largest mountain in Alaska and North America. For all their disputes over extraction, Native and Alaska political leaders were largely united in wanting to keep its traditional Athabascan name of Denali, which translates to 'the high one.' 'We need jobs … to stand on our own two feet' It takes years for proposed extraction projects to unfold, if they ever do. The extent of oil reserves in the Arctic refuge remains uncertain. Limited infrastructure and harsh weather raise costs. No major oil company bid during the only two lease sales offered to date in the Arctic refuge. But the measures pushed by the new administration and Congress amount to the latest pendulum swing between Republican and Democratic presidents, between policies prioritizing extraction and environmental protections. The budget bill calls for additional lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, west of the Arctic refuge, and opening more areas to potential leasing than authorized under recent Democratic administrations. Alaska's political leaders generally have cheered on the push for more extraction, including its Republican congressional delegation and its governor, who has called his state 'America's natural resource warehouse.' So have some Native leaders, who say their communities stand to benefit from jobs and revenues. They say such projects are critical to their economic prospects and self-determination, providing jobs and helping their communities pay for schools, streets and snow removal. They've accused the previous administration of President Joe Biden of ignoring their voices. 'We need jobs. Our people need training, to stand on our own two feet. Our kids need a future,' said PJ Simon, first chief of the Allakaket Tribal Council. He said communities can maintain their traditions while benefiting from economic development — but that it's crucial that public officials and businesses include them in the planning. 'Native people want to be heard, not pushed aside,' Simon said. Mayor Nathan Gordon Jr. of Kaktovik, the only community within the Arctic refuge, applauded the budget bill. It enables Kaktovik 'to strengthen our community, preserve our cultural traditions, and ensure that we can remain in our homelands for years to come,' he said in a statement issued by Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, a group advocating for oil exploration. A 'lack of respect' for Native subsistence traditions But Native opponents of such projects say short-term economic gains come at the risk of long-term environmental impacts that will reverberate widely. 'We're kind of viewed as the last frontier, like we have unlimited resources,' said Sophie Swope, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Mother Kuskokwim Tribal Coalition. She said Alaska's most renewable resources — such as salmon, deer and other migratory wildlife — are threatened both by overly aggressive ocean fishing and by extractive industries. 'There's that lack of respect for our traditional subsistence lifestyles,' she said. Opponents of oil drilling in the Arctic refuge fear it will permanently disrupt the long-range migration of caribou, which Native people have hunted for millennia. The Tanana Chiefs Conference, a coalition representing dozens of tribes in Alaska's interior south of the refuge, has long opposed the drilling. A massive caribou herd goes to the refuge's coastal plain to calve in the spring before fanning out across a wider area, providing a crucial food source for Native hunters in Alaska and Canada. If the herd's migration is disrupted, opponents fear an impact similar to the salmon collapse — a loss not just of food but of a focal point of culture and spirituality. While the source of the salmon crisis is uncertain, researchers say possible causes include the impacts of commercial fishing, disease, warming waters, other environmental changes and competition between wild and hatchery-reared fish. In a June policy brief, Indigenous leaders, scientists and policy experts called for further study and for easing the disproportionate impact of the crisis on subsistence fishermen. But if the salmon collapse's cause isn't clear, its impact is. It has meant 'no fish camps, no traditional knowledge that's been passed down to our younger generation,' said Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Fairbanks-based advocacy group Gwich'in Steering Committee. Moreland said she regularly takes her children to her home village in the north to reconnect with traditional festivals and activities, including those centered around the caribou hunt: 'They learn all our traditional knowledge that way. What if the caribou doesn't migrate up there anymore?' The yearslong battle over the refuge takes its toll, she said. 'How long do we have to advocate for our land and our people?' Chief Brian Ridley of the Tanana Chiefs Conference said he sympathizes with those tribal leaders supporting development, given the shortage of well-paying jobs in many villages. But concern over potential long-term environmental damage has prompted the conference to oppose projects such as oil drilling in the Arctic refuge and the nearer Yukon Flats, as well as construction of the so-called Ambler Road, which could open access to mining in more remote areas. Ridley said he recently attended a national conference with other tribal leaders who echoed a common theme — opposing 'development projects on our land or near our land that come in and promise jobs and whatnot, and they come and go and then we get stuck with the long-term negative aspects of cleanup and restoration.' Empty smokehouses, broken spirits In southwestern Alaska, a proposed major mine, the Donlin Gold project, has long been debated. The project, planned by private investors in cooperation with Native corporations owning the land and mineral rights, would require a massive dam to hold back millions of tons of mineral and chemical waste in a valley. Project proponents say the dam will involve state-of-the-art design, with its wide base anchored to bedrock and the surrounding mountain walls incorporated into containing the debris. Proponents tout benefits including jobs, shareholder payments and funds for such things as village services and education. 'This kind of project, since it's on our lands, is different than most other resource projects,' said Thomas Leonard, vice president of corporate affairs for Calista Corp., a regional Alaska Native corporation involved. 'We literally have a seat at the table, have a voice in the project.' But opponents, such as Mother Kuskokwim and some area tribes, aren't convinced and say the risk of a failure on the Kuskokwim watershed is too great. 'Protecting the river and the land and the Earth is part of the partnership and the relationship that we have as caregivers,' Simeon said. That relationship isn't abstract, Simeon said. She said the disruption of communal hunting and fishing activities leads to a spiritual rootlessness that she believes contributes to alarming rates of addictions and suicide among Alaska Native people. 'What does it do to your heart and soul when you have to look at an empty smokehouse year after year after year, and you can't provide for your family?' Simeon said. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Arundhati Roy works among dozens of books banned in Indian-administered Kashmir
The government in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir has banned 25 books, including works by the Booker-prize winning author Arundhati Roy, accusing them of promoting a 'false narrative and secessionism' in the disputed territory. The censorship order was issued by Manoj Sinha, the lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir, who was appointed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) under the prime minister, Narendra Modi. Sinha was previously a minister in Modi's BJP government. According to the directive issued by Jammu and Kashmir's home ministry on Sinha's instructions, it had 'come to the notice of the government, that certain literature propagates false narrative and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir'. The 25 books named in the order range from historical narratives of the region by well-known academics, historians and journalists, both from Kashmir and abroad, to documentation of human rights atrocities committed in Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir is one of the most heavily militarised territories in the world. The Kashmir region has been disputed by Indian and Pakistan since independence, with the two countries controlling parts of it. Since the 1990s, Indian-ruled Kashmir has been home to a militant separatist insurgency and a long-running campaign by Indian forces to crack down on militancy has led to accusations of widespread abuses carried out with impunity including enforced disappearances, tens of thousands of killings and a crushing of freedom of expression under draconian laws. The Indian government has denied the accusations. Roy's book Azadi, which includes essays on the thousands allegedly killed and disappeared in Kashmir by Indian forces in recent decades, and Independent Kashmir by the Australian political scientist Christopher Snedden, which explores the Kashmiri fight for independence, were among the banned books. Other titles the government ordered to be banned from publication and forfeited by all bookshops in the region included Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation by the US-based academic Hafsa Kanjwal and Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka by Sumantra Bose, a professor at the London School of Economics. The government alleged that the content of the books 'would deeply impact the psyche of youth by promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood and terrorist heroism'. The order accused the works of glorifying terrorists, distorting history and promoting violence and claimed they had 'contributed to the radicalisation of youth in Jammu and Kashmir'. Authors named in the order expressed frustration at their works being censored in the very region they addressed. Angana Chatterji, a scholar at University of California, Berkeley, who wrote one of the essays in the now-banned Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, said the order 'underscores the state's intent to criminalise scholarship and render it seditious'. 'The symbolic and material impact of this ban stands to be extensive,' said Chatterji. 'It restimulates psychological operations to terrify and isolate Kashmiris, and silence their pain and resistance.' She alleged that the decree of censorship was part of a wider agenda by the Indian government to 'erase the decades-long history of state violence, terror, and impunity in Kashmir'. The order, she added, had 'signalled that it fears critique and will not tolerate the free exchange of ideas'. Allegations of attacks on free expression and press freedom in Jammu and Kashmir have mounted since 2019, when the Modi-led government unilaterally stripped Kashmir of its decades-long autonomy and statehood, brought it fully under the control of the central government and began a widespread crackdown on dissent. In February, police in Kashmir raided dozens of bookshops and seized more than 650 books, alleging they promoted a 'banned ideology'.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Arundhati Roy works among dozens of books banned in India-administered Kashmir
The government in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir has banned 25 books, including works by the Booker-prize winning author Arundhati Roy, accusing them of promoting a 'false narrative and secessionism' in the disputed territory. The censorship order was issued by Manoj Sinha, the lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir, who was appointed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) under the prime minister, Narendra Modi. Sinha was previously a minister in Modi's BJP government. According to the directive issued by Jammu and Kashmir's home ministry on Sinha's instructions, it had 'come to the notice of the government, that certain literature propagates false narrative and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir'. The 25 books named in the order range from historical narratives of the region by well-known academics, historians and journalists, both from Kashmir and abroad, to documentation of human rights atrocities committed in Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir is one of the most heavily militarised territories in the world. The Kashmir region has been disputed by Indian and Pakistan since independence, with the two countries controlling parts of it. Since the 1990s, Indian-ruled Kashmir has been home to a militant separatist insurgency and a long-running campaign by Indian forces to crack down on militancy has led to accusations of widespread abuses carried out with impunity including enforced disappearances, tens of thousands of killings and a crushing of freedom of expression under draconian laws. The Indian government has denied the accusations. Roy's book Azadi, which includes essays on the thousands allegedly killed and disappeared in Kashmir by Indian forces in recent decades, and Independent Kashmir by the Australian political scientist Christopher Snedden, which explores the Kashmiri fight for independence, were among the banned books. Other titles the government ordered to be banned from publication and forfeited by all bookshops in the region included Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation by the US-based academic Hafsa Kanjwal and Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka by Sumantra Bose, a professor at the London School of Economics. The government alleged that the content of the books 'would deeply impact the psyche of youth by promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood and terrorist heroism'. The order accused the works of glorifying terrorists, distorting history and promoting violence and claimed they had 'contributed to the radicalisation of youth in Jammu and Kashmir'. Authors named in the order expressed frustration at their works being censored in the very region they addressed. Angana Chatterji, a scholar at University of California, Berkeley, who wrote one of the essays in the now-banned Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, said the order 'underscores the state's intent to criminalise scholarship and render it seditious'. 'The symbolic and material impact of this ban stands to be extensive,' said Chatterji. 'It restimulates psychological operations to terrify and isolate Kashmiris, and silence their pain and resistance.' She alleged that the decree of censorship was part of a wider agenda by the Indian government to 'erase the decades-long history of state violence, terror, and impunity in Kashmir' . The order, she added, had 'signalled that it fears critique and will not tolerate the free exchange of ideas'. Allegations of attacks on free expression and press freedom in Jammu and Kashmir have mounted since 2019, when the Modi-led government unilaterally stripped Kashmir of its decades-long autonomy and statehood, brought it fully under the control of the central government and began a widespread crackdown on dissent. In February, police in Kashmir raided dozens of bookshops and seized more than 650 books, alleging they promoted a 'banned ideology'.
