‘A human face on an abstract problem’: ICJ forced to listen to climate victims

The village of Veraibari in Papua New Guinea sits at the mouth of the Kikori River, just before it opens into the Pacific. “Veraibari was so beautiful when I was a child,” remembers Ara Kouwo, 52. “I used to walk down to the beach passing under mango trees.”

Kouwo’s testimony was one of many included in written submissions to the international court of justice (ICJ) before hearings that began last week and continue until Friday in a landmark case in which the court has been asked to give an advisory opinion on “the obligations of states in respect of climate change”.

In the document, an annexe to a submission from the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a regional subgroup that includes Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, Kouwo describes seeing the seas rise over his lifetime, destroying precious coconut forests, traditional burial grounds and homes.

Villagers from Veraibari have already been forced to move four times. Caught between a river and an ocean, they are now planning a fifth and final relocation. “The seas are corning into our houses, which are already built on tall wooden post foundations,” Kouwo said. “If this relocation fails, we have nowhere else we can go.”

Julian Aguon, a lawyer who represents the Melanesian Spearhead Group, said of Kouwo’s plight: “There is no crisis more existential than that.”

The ICJ is very strict about who it will hear from in developing its advisory opinion. Unlike the inter-American court of human rights, which is similarly producing an advisory opinion, it limits formal submissions to states and a handful of permitted organisations.

As a result, Aguon’s Guam-based law firm, Blue Ocean Law, spent a year gathering testimonies from the region to include in its documentation. “As an Indigenous-led law firm, we conceived of this as a sacred duty to bring this story of real-life, real-time climate harm to the court,” he said. “We’ve done everything that we could think of to try to amplify the voices of exactly these communities, because they have never been heard in these halls before.”

Aguon was approached in 2019 to help Vanuatu request an advisory opinion from the court, an idea initiated by a group of Pacific island law students. It was an uphill battle to get the UN to agree, said Aguon, and there has since been concerted work to coordinate submissions by nations that stand to lose the most from climate change, particularly from the Pacific and Caribbean. For many states it is their first time speaking in front of this court.

Representatives from small Pacific island states outside the ICJ last week. Photograph: Michel Porro/Getty Images

Aguon has since watched most states echo Vanuatu and Melanesia’s identification of legal duties on big historical emitters and calls for reparations including financial compensation, debt cancellation and continued statehood even if territory is lost.

“It’s validating to see all of these other countries agree with that framing,” he said. “This about the vast majority of the human race that really needs a decisive interruption to the status quo.”

The stories of victims are central to these efforts. Many states have presented climate change as a crisis unfolding now, describing the loss of staple foods of huge cultural significance, showing images of graveyards being washed away and videos of people whose livelihoods are under threat.

“We know that the fundamental right to self-determination has been violated in the most grievous ways,” Aguon said. “And we understand now, having been in communities across this subregion, just how high the stakes are.”

These stories serve to highlight the historic injustices that underpin climate change and that continue to make some communities, especially Indigenous peoples, more vulnerable to it, said Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney in the climate and energy programme at the Center for International Environmental Law. “Many states at the frontlines of the climate crisis reflected decolonisation struggles and established how decisions being made far away from their islands are unjustly devastating the lives of their people.”

It is not the only way in which marginalised communities have been elevated during these important legal proceedings. Youth activists organised a people’s assembly alongside the main hearings in The Hague, where testimonies were heard about the impact of the climate crisis on the lives of people – mostly youth – from around the world including Sudan, West Papua, Greenland and Pakistan. Experts listening to the stories have written an outcomes document that they plan to add to the judges’ evidence pile.

Among other things, they raised the specific issue of overseas territories struggling to adapt while the mainland is exacerbating the climate crisis, and who lack an independent voice. A court in the Netherlands will examine this in greater detail next year in a lawsuit brought by Dutch Caribbean islanders.

David Boyd, the UN’s former special rapporteur on human rights, said the very formal process of the ICJ hearings needed to be complemented by the stories of directly affected people. He said he was deeply moved by hearing these voices, which have been excluded from global climate talks. “It puts a human face on what can be an abstract problem,” he said.

A Witness Stand for Climate Justice digital billboard in The Hague. Photograph: Lennard van der Valk/Interactive Media Foundation

The work of raising voices has continued outside the court. The Witness Stand for Climate Justice, set up by Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, allows people to record their own stories, and snippets from these have been put on posters and projections around The Hague.

Aguon said Blue Ocean Law took on this job because it wanted to provide maximum legal protection for communities, particularly Indigenous peoples, with a radically different imagination about the world. In the process, he has seen Pacific island teams grow increasingly empowered to take up space in an institution that has traditionally been hostile to them. “They’ve opened the door and they’re walking in, and they’re bringing the fullness of their lived experiences and doing their absolute best in the system that they didn’t create,” he said.

He is shaped by his own experiences of US military activities on his home island of Guam. “I advance an argument about the fundamental right to self-determination, a right that my own people are denied,” he said. “To make that argument in this hall, a hall that my own people cannot access, is humbling, but it’s also maddening. It’s this reality that so many vulnerable people have to confront daily. We have to live in the world as it actually is, not as we wish it to be, but bend the hell out of it.”