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

Marginalised communities have been elevated during hearings in The Hague on impact of climate crisis

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.

Cover photo: Julian Aguon, who represents the Melanesian Spearhead Group, addresses the international court of justice in The Hague. Photograph: ICJ