In July 2025, the international court of justice delivered a landmark decision that clarified that all states were bound under international law to tackle the human-made climate crisis, which the judges unanimously concluded posed an “urgent and existential threat” to the planet’s life-sustaining systems and therefore humanity itself.
The ICJ advisory opinion built on rulings from hundreds of climate lawsuits across the world over the past decade or more, and added further legal weight to strong decisions from the inter-American court of human rights in July 2025 and the international tribunal on the law of the sea in May 2024.
They do seem to take them all over, don’t they? At which point we should probably start leaving them….
Crucially, the judges rejected arguments from high polluting countries who opposed the ICJ case – including the US, UK, China, the EU, Russia and Saudi Arabia
Not remotely crucial unless you are unfortunate enough to live in the UK or EU (the others will tell the judges to pound sand).
The Climate Crisis appears to be the best way to control stupid people to get them to do exactly what you want. Based on an anecdotal, unserious sample of lawyers like Lammy and Starmer, it’s no wonder that includes judges…
The Climate Crisis will never make the lawyers sacrifice anything, it will always be others. So it’s not surprising they support it.
“The ICJ advisory opinion …”
Wow, we could hardly just ignore something like that could we?
To paraphrase Stalin, “The ICJ; how many divisions does it have?”.
Exactly. If there were any such thing as ‘international law’ (as opposed to ‘international lawyers’) there would necessarily be international law enforcement. Since the latter doesn’t exits, neither does the former.
“urgent and existential threat”
Unless you think RCP8.5 is going to happen (and it isn’t) then no, there isn’t anything urgent about it. If the climate scientists are right, they’ll be problems but existential threat any time in the next couple of hundred years is not happening.
Oh no… It’s definitely an “urgent and existential threat”…
To the grants, sinecures and cushy Offices of the leeches and bottomfeeders fuelling all this.
Yes, funny how the IPCC failed to call CC an existential threat to human survival or explain that we’re destroying the planet a single time in all their reports. How’d they miss something so obvious that pretty much every pop star figured it out?
Has Communist China stopped building coal-fired power stations?
No!
Adam Weiss, chief programmes and impact officer at ClientEarth, said: “Right now, we live in a world where it’s possible to make a profit from digging up fossil fuels and burning them. That is absurd, and the ICJ told us that the international legal system cannot continue to make that possible.
… all states were bound under international law to tackle the human-made climate crisis, which the judges unanimously concluded posed an “urgent and existential threat” to the planet’s life-sustaining systems and therefore humanity itself.
Which, scientifically-speaking is about as valid as the (apocryphal) “deep-south” town council that passed a law declaring that Pi should equal 3.
Not apocryphal, Baron. The actual story is hilarious and stands as a universally-ignored warning and lesson to the ignorant legalistic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
Lawyers are an existential threat to civilisation itself. We can have electricity, hot running water, and safety for our children, or we can continue to let lawyers live.
Who do I vote for to get a change of policy? I can’t, you say? Well that shit doesn’t apply to me. That court has no jurisdiction here.
One of Trump’s first executive orders was to tell ICJ that if they fuck with US or any of its allies, it will be an act of war.
Ooooo, the inter-American court of human rights, based in Costa Rica! That shining beacon of South American justice that no one really listens to. That’ll give this some weight!