Articles for tag: climate change, IGH, Klimakrise, Rechtsgutachten, Seerecht, Small Islands

Sea-Level Rise Reaches The Hague

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The advisory opinion rendered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 23 July 2025 marks a pivotal moment in the articulation of States’ obligations concerning climate change. While based on broader rules and principles of international law, the opinion foregrounded the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as a key legal framework relevant to defining States’ climate obligations. As the ICJ itself stated, UNCLOS ‘forms part of the most directly relevant applicable law’ (para. 124). Thus, far from peripheral, the law of the sea emerged as a primary site for interpreting and enforcing States’ climate obligations under international law.

4. August 2025

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Rising Before Sinking

On 22 September 2022, just one day before global climate protests took place in around 450 locations, the UN Human Rights Committee (Committee) has published its landmark decision in the case Daniel Billy et al. v. Australia. In casu, the Committee found that Australia failed to adequately protect members of an indigenous community present in four small, low-lying islands in the Torres Strait region from adverse impacts of climate change, which resulted in the violation of the complainants’ rights to enjoy their culture (Art. 27 ICPPR) and to be free from arbitrary interferences with their private life, family and home (Art. 17 ICCPR). The Committee thereby issued the first decision at the international level to tackle substantive human rights questions in the context of climate change that relate to the current situation of small islands and their indigenous inhabitants.

3. Oktober 2022

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