12 August 2025
A Panoply of Consequences?
Among the most significant – but underexplored – aspects of the ICJ’s climate advisory opinion is its treatment of reparations and remedies. This blog post unpacks the legal consequences outlined by the ICJ, examining what the opinion says – and does not say – about how climate-related harm should be remedied. At the heart of this analysis lies a central question: can the affirmation of legal responsibility, without clear guidance on the design of reparations, meaningfully advance climate justice? Continue reading >>
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11 August 2025
Harmonizing Sources, Hardening Duties
The ICJ’s advisory opinion on climate change may come to be remembered as the moment international law explicitly rose to the climate challenge. Yet, what the opinion offers is not a new edifice but a sturdier legal architecture. By advancing an “all of the above” approach to international law’s sources; by treating these sources as interlocking parts of a living legal system; and by recognizing erga omnes and erga omnes partes duties with concrete consequences for responsibility, the Court has given States, courts and litigants a legally rigorous, source‑sensitive map. Continue reading >>
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08 August 2025
Klarheit aus Den Haag
Am 23. Juli 2025 verkündete der Internationale Gerichtshof (IGH) sein lange erwartetes Gutachten zu den „Pflichten der Staaten in Bezug auf den Klimawandel“. Darin bestätigte das Gericht, dass Staaten nach geltendem Völkerrecht verpflichtet sind, erhebliche Schäden am Klimasystem zu verhindern. Kommen sie dieser Pflicht nicht nach, können sie haftbar gemacht werden. Das Gutachten hat tiefgreifende Konsequenzen für Produzenten fossiler Energieträger und zieht zudem erhebliche Auswirkungen auf das internationale Investitionsrecht nach sich. Continue reading >>
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08 August 2025
Of Warming and Warzones
Despite mounting attention to the impacts of military activities and conflicts on climate mitigation and adaptation in recent years, the issue remains largely absent from international legal scrutiny. Therefore, the very fact that several States and organizations raised it during the advisory proceedings held last December left the few scholars and practitioners working on this issue hopeful. This post reviews how the issue of armed conflicts and military emissions was addressed during the ICJ advisory proceedings. Despite the ICJ’s silence, the post highlights a few interpretative openings that may have legal implications for the regulation of wartime climate harms and explores what the ICJ’s ruling means for the legal visibility and accountability of military emissions. Continue reading >>
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07 August 2025
State Responsibility and the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on Climate Change
After the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its advisory opinion on Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change, many observers were quick to conclude that it “[opens] the door to a cascade of lawsuits” (Politico). The opinion is indeed an important confirmation that the rules of State responsibility apply in the climate change context. In this post, I assess the ICJ’s treatment of State responsibility in light of the particularities of climate change, especially the plurality of States that contribute to, and suffer from, climate harm. The advisory opinion places trust in the capabilities and flexibility of the applicable rules, yet defers complex decisions on questions like causation to a case-by-case assessment. Continue reading >>
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06 August 2025
The Struggle Against Fossil Sovereignty
Over the course of decades, law has primarily functioned to enable and support the extraction, production, and consumption of fossil energy. As a result, planetary destruction remains not only awfully lucrative but also, in many cases, legally protected. The substantive impact of the ICJ’s advisory opinion on climate change will depend largely on how effectively it contributes to dismantling the stronghold of fossil sovereignty. That tangled web of fossil-friendly laws has often obstructed or blunted progressive climate politics or any other interference with unsustainable, fossil-driven profit-making. Continue reading >>
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05 August 2025
New Standards in Government Framework Litigation
The ICJ advisory opinion articulates very clearly States’ international obligations with respect to climate change. Its findings that States’ mitigation efforts must reflect their highest possible ambition, be capable of achieving the 1.5oC goal, and be fair and ambitious, determined through the application of CBDR-RC are momentous, as are its conclusions on remedies. Government framework litigation can serve to hold States to these obligations – just as plaintiffs have done for the past 10 years. Given the multitude of lawsuits pending against governments around the world. Continue reading >>
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04 August 2025
Sea-Level Rise Reaches The Hague
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. Continue reading >>
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01 August 2025
Human Rights in the ICJ’s Climate Opinion
This summer has seen two major climate advisory opinions published – first from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and then from the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Both opinions address human rights law, embedding human rights in a broader overarching framework of international law that also includes international climate treaties and customary international law. But how do these opinions compare, and what room does the ICJ leave for continuing development of human rights standards by other relevant courts and treaty bodies? Continue reading >>
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01 August 2025
The Ruling and the Mirror
Much of the commentary that has emerged so far, in this symposium and in seemingly every other corner of the internet, focuses on the legal content of the opinion: the articulation of States’ obligations under international law, the rejection of the lex specialis argument, and the recognition of the right to a healthy environment, inter many alia. Yet beyond the legal reasoning and doctrinal outcomes lies something else. The opinion is also an act of identity performance: a way for the ICJ to speak about itself. Continue reading >>
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