The ICJ just gave the Global South legal ammunition

Last month, the International Court of Justice delivered the most consequential legal text on climate change in history, and it could not have come at a more urgent moment for the Philippines.

- ANNA MAE YU LAMENTILLO

In a unanimous advisory opinion, the Court said in plain language that every State now bears binding obligations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, help each other adapt, and repair the damage already done. These duties flow not only from the Paris Agreement and its predecessors but also from customary international law and human-rights treaties. They are owed to the entire international community—obligations erga omnes—so any country that is harmed may call the violators to account. By stressing that each injured State “may separately invoke the responsibility of every State which has committed an internationally wrongful act” in causing climate harm, the Court has armed vulnerable nations with a legal slingshot aimed at the largest polluters.

For the Philippines, the stakes of this pronouncement are existential. Germanwatch’s latest Climate Risk Index shows our archipelago is the 10th most battered nation on earth when three decades of typhoons, floods, and droughts are tallied. Between 1993 and 2022 we endured 372 extreme-weather events that wiped out an estimated $34 billion and, in many cases, entire communities. Each new storm season lengthens a ledger of loss that no domestic budget can balance. The ICJ has now confirmed that this mounting debt is not merely bad luck; it is the foreseeable consequence of breaches of international duty, and those breaches carry an obligation of full reparation.