The ICJ just gave the Global South legal ammunition

Originally published in Manila Bulletin

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. 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.

Manila was quick to read the wind. Two days after the ruling, the Department of Foreign Affairs “welcomed the ICJ’s advisory opinion,” noting that the decision clarifies a legal path to hold high-emitting countries responsible for crossing the 1.5 °C red line. That diplomatic statement was more than polite applause. It signals an intention to thread the Court’s language into every negotiation on climate finance and technology transfer. When the new Loss-and-Damage Fund’s board gathers in Manila this October, Philippine delegates will cite The Hague to demand that pledges resemble reparations, not charity.

Civil society is even more energetic. The Commission on Human Rights’ 2022 National Inquiry—which traced a fifth of historic carbon dioxide to 90 “Carbon Majors” and found their products responsible for roughly half the observed rise in global temperature—already concluded that these firms owe remedies to those they have harmed. The ICJ opinion transforms that moral finding into stronger legal ammunition. Climate-impacted survivors of Haiyan, Odette, or the latest inundations in Bulacan now possess an authoritative text they can wave in courtrooms from Quezon City to Strasbourg.

There is, of course, a difference between legal theory and political reality. Advisory opinions, unlike judgments in contentious cases, are not automatically enforceable. Yet history shows they shift the center of gravity in global negotiations and domestic policy. The 1971 Namibia advisory opinion set the stage for sanctions that helped end apartheid; the 1996 nuclear-weapons opinion fortified non-proliferation treaties. Expect this climate opinion to perform similar alchemy. Already, lawyers in Canberra, Wellington, and Bridgetown are drafting pleadings to test whether the new erga omnes obligations can anchor fresh litigation against gigatonne emitters. When those cases reach tribunals, judges will look to the ICJ’s meticulous reasoning on causation, which rejects the excuse that climate harm is too “diffuse” to attribute.

At home, the opinion supplies constitutional heft for a raft of stalled reforms. Legislators debating a higher renewable-energy quota or mandatory climate-risk disclosures can no longer frame them as discretionary policy choices. The Court has declared due-diligence regulation of private actors to be a State obligation. Any failure to tighten environmental impact assessments or to release adaptation money from the People’s Survival Fund now sits on shakier legal ground. The same applies to new fossil-fuel permits: approving another gas-fired plant after this ruling invites judicial scrutiny the Department of Energy has never faced before.

Some will say the Philippines is too small to litigate against carbon behemoths or to shame them into compliance. That objection ignores both our history and the clarity of the Court’s prose. The Philippines did not wait to be an economic powerhouse before standing up for human rights in the West Philippine Sea arbitration. We need the same resolve now. The ICJ has affirmed that global commons like the atmosphere confer a shared legal interest on all States, rich or poor; diplomacy and litigation are not mutually exclusive but complementary tools.

From Tacloban’s rebuilt seawalls to farmers replanting salt-poisoned paddies in Pampanga, Filipinos understand the cost of delay. The Court has given us—and every vulnerable nation—a powerful lever. Our task is to pry open the door it points to: a future where those who heat the planet pay the bill, and those who suffer first gain the means to adapt. We owe it to the memory of the dead and to the children who will inherit the shoreline we leave behind.

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