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LEADERS OF NINE small island states have taken a case to the UN maritime court to seek protection for the world’s oceans from catastrophic climate change that poses major threats to vulnerable countries.
The island states are requesting the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) to determine if carbon dioxide emissions absorbed by the oceans can be considered pollution, and if so, what obligations countries have to prevent it.
“This is the opening chapter in the struggle to change the conduct of the international community by clarifying the obligation of states to protect the marine environment,” said the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne.
“The time has come to speak in terms of legally binding obligations rather than empty promises that go unfulfilled,” he told the court, which is based in Hamburg, Germany.
Counsel representing the islands, Catherine Amirfar, said the motivation for the case was to force countries to implement substantive measures against climate change.
“We’re here to discuss what are the necessary, concrete, specific steps that they must take as a matter of law, not political discretion. That’s key and… a big part of the answer,” she told journalists.
Ocean ecosystems create half the oxygen humans breathe and limit global warming by absorbing much of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities.
Increasing emissions can warm and acidify seawaters, harming marine life.
At the heart of the case is the international treaty UNCLOS that binds countries to preventing pollution of the oceans.
The UN treaty defines pollution as the introduction by humans of “substances or energy into the marine environment” that harms marine life but it does not spell out carbon emissions as a specific pollutant. The plaintiffs argue that these emissions should qualify.
The push for climate justice won a big boost in March when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling on the International Court of Justice to lay out nations’ obligations on protecting the Earth’s climate and the legal consequences they face for failing to do so.
The ICJ’s advice is still pending but the action has opened up a new front to bind countries to pledges on reducing emissions.
The move at the UN had been led by Vanuatu, one of the island nations that brought today’s case before the ITLOS.
Small islands like Vanuatu are particularly exposed to the impact of global warming, with seawater rises posing an existential threat.
“Just a few years — this is all we have before the ocean consumes everything my people built across centuries,” Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Kausea Natano told the court.
“If international law has nothing to say about an entire country going underwater… then what purpose does it serve?” he said, pleading for a clear direction from the court.
Browne also voiced frustration at the attitude of some major nations when it comes to funding climate change mitigation or prevention.
When “large polluters contribute towards various funds, they believe it’s an act of charity,” he said at a press conference, adding that a successful outcome would tell them that “they have legal obligations”.
Concrete measures, according to Vanuatu’s attorney-general Arnold Loughman, could include halting deep-sea drilling for oil.
“It’s time to come up with solutions and ways of stopping these countries from continuing to drill,” he said.
Across the two-thirds of the planet covered by seas, nearly 60% of surface waters experienced at least one marine heatwave in 2022, according to the annual State of the Climate report led by scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That is 50% more than pre-industrial levels and “the highest in the modern atmospheric record and in paleoclimate records dating back as far as 800,000 years”, according to the report, published this month.
The world’s oceans set a new temperature record in August, with average sea surface temperatures reaching 21 degrees Celsius for over a week, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The other island states joining the ITLOS case are the Bahamas, Niue, Palau, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, while another 34 state parties will participate in the court hearing.
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Some neck on these two.
@The Viking: I guess if you were in their situation and facing years in prison we all chance your arm at anything.
The arrogance of these people is hard for me to take. It’s obvious there guilty
@Paul O Riordan: They didn’t offer any real defence in court as they knew it would be ripped apart by the prosecution.
I have to say I was shocked to see the jury members say what they were saying on the TV. I thought there would be some sort of instruction not to speak to the media about their jury duty.
@Paul Mc Nulty: it’s certainly not the way things are done here. But apparently the judge would have needed to issue the jurors with a gag order, which he didn’t.
@Donnachaín Ní Uallacháin: or issue the media with an order not to harass jurors in any trial. The media is at fault here not the jury. Media are supposed to be professional the jurors are lay people not used to dealing with the law or madia outlets.
I just hope the conviction is upheld but if a new trial is called i hope they are convicted of murder 1
I had several issues with the claims of the two. The number of blows, time elapsed before calling for aid, and her rubbing at her neck during police custody. Additionally, if my father were in the position of hers, he would come to my defence with fists, not a bat. He would be up and running, not stopping for a weapon.
@Rathminder: also telling is the fact that he told police that he woke to hear them arguing and stomping around upstairs and he went up with the intention of telling them to ‘knock it off’. Why would he bring a baseball bat to do that? And he was still wearing his watch which is unusual as most people would take their watch off before going to bed. Unless he stopped to put it back on again before going for the baseball bat.
As he is a former member of the FBI, i would have thought he would have been able to commit, cover up and justify the murder in a more professional manner
@Anne Marie Devlin: He may not have been very good at his job. The police said the crime scene was altered.
It was obvious that Molly Martens was told to wear loose-fitting dresses, flat shoes and a ponytail to portray the small, innocent schoolgirl look. They tried to portray Jason Corbett as a big, violent Irish lout. They banked too heavily on the typical Irish stereotype. I think it would have been prudent for the judge to issue a gag order in this case because this pair will stop at nothing. They just can’t accept the fact that they are not above the law.
So two murderers are putting their faith in a technicality to get off.
@Niallers: Unfortunately it is often more thsn enough to get away with murder.
US attorneys go out of their way to tell their clients how to look and act, and pick jurors based on their estimates of their prejudices based on age, gender and background.
When their sociopath clients show no remorse in the courtroom they then complain that the same jurors judged their clients based on prejudice against sociopaths.
As much as I like hearing jurors talk about their cases after the fact, they should have some advice from judges about how to phrase any statements so as not to leave open doors to appeal from public statements.
I don’t think the jurors were swayed by outside influences.
More like the the fact that they were bloody guilty!
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