The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is preparing to hand down its first-ever opinion on climate change, seen by many as a historic moment in international law.
Judges have waded through tens of thousands of pages of written submissions and heard two weeks of oral arguments during the ICJ’s biggest-ever case.
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The court’s 15 judges will seek to pull together different strands of environmental law into one definitive international standard when they deliver their findings at the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, at 3pm local time on Wednesday (13:00 GMT).
The court’s “advisory opinion” is expected to run to several hundred pages, as it clarifies nations’ obligations to prevent climate change and the consequences for polluters that have failed to do so.
This speaks to the first question put to the court by the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu and other countries bringing the case: What responsibilities do countries have to tackle climate change?
Countries that are top fossil fuel polluters say the court does not need to address the question as legal provisions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are enough.
But climate advocates argue that the ICJ should adopt a broader approach to the issue, including a reference to human rights law and the laws of the sea.
Vanuatu urged judges at The Hague to consider “the entire corpus of international law” in its opinion, arguing the ICJ was uniquely placed to do so.
The ICJ is “the only international jurisdiction with a general competence over all areas of international law, which allows it to provide such an answer,” the island nation argued.
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The judges will also consider if there should be legal consequences for countries that contribute the most to the climate crisis.
The United States, the world’s biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, and other top polluters referred the court to the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, which does not explicitly provide for direct compensation for past damage caused by pollution.
Issues around liability are considered sensitive to many countries in climate negotiations, but at UN talks in 2022, wealthy nations did agree to create a fund to help vulnerable countries deal with current impacts caused by past pollution.
“We’re hoping that the ICJ will say that it is a legal obligation of states to address climate change. You have to respect other states and their right to self-determination,” Vanuatu Minister for Climate Change Ralph Regenvanu said on the eve of the ruling.
“Colonialism is gone – you know, supposedly gone – but this is a hangover where your conduct as a state continues to suppress the future of the people of another country,” Regenvanu said.
“And you don’t have a legal right to do that under international law. And not only that, but if your actions have already caused this harm, there have to be reparations for that,” he added.
Vishal Prasad, one of 27 then-law students at the University of the South Pacific who pushed for Vanuatu to take up the case back in 2019, says he is “emotional, scared, nervous, anxious”, ahead of Wednesday’s ruling.
Prasad, who is now the director of the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change group, says that climate change is an “existential problem for young people in countries like Kiribati, in Tuvalu, in Marshall Islands”.
“They’re witnessing the effects of climate change every high tide,” he said.
Prasad added that Pacific Island cultures celebrate the concept of “wayfinding”.
“You need to correct your course if you are going wrong,” he said.
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