I have recently been engaged as a consultant by Displacement Solutions to produce three legal reports to assist climate displaced persons in seeking redress for their human rights violations.
The subsequent reports will identify all the forums that exist around the world where a climate displaced person can raise their human rights concerns. The final report will outline three test cases that could be brought before the identified fora. Collectively, the three reports aim to provide practitioners and climate displaced persons with an avenue for redress.
The first report, which was recently published, examined every case that has ever been litigated in which the human rights impacts of climate displacement were discussed. Sadly, only 9 cases in the history of litigation even touched on the issue. None of these cases focused directly on climate displacement.
In addition to the alarmingly low number of cases, the report highlights the largely narrow and limited view that international tribunals take of the issue of sea level rise, climate displacement and even the notion that an entire state could be submerged under water.
Take, for example, the humanitarian case of Ioane Teitiota - an individual from Kiribati, widely believed to be the first country in the world to be completely submerged by rising sea levels. This individual argued that his human right to life was under threat. In support of this claim, they made several arguments, one of which was that the entire island of Kiribati would be uninhabitable within 10 to 15 years. A prediction that has largely come true - Kiribati now has no fresh groundwater, virtually all nutritious food is imported because it cannot grow in Kiribati due to groundwater salinity, and faces significant emigration problems. For Kiribati's climate experts, the question is no longer how to mitigate the effects of sea-level rise, but rather how to maintain culture when the only remaining idea of Kiribati is a memory.
Despite the seriousness of sea-level rise, the United Nations Human Rights Committee does not consider an island sinking in 10 to 15 years to be a threat to life.
I can't help thinking that if coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles or Tokyo were to be under the sea in 10 to 15 years, would that be a threat to life?
The report, which discusses cases similar to Ioane Teitiota's, is largely written for human rights practitioners and climate-displaced people as a first research step in advancing any climate displacement case. But it also provides a useful overview of how international law currently perceives this threat. Overall, I hope it will reduce the amount of time individuals spend on research, allowing them to spend more time with their clients and advancing legal arguments.
The report is available here: https://issuu.com/displacementsolutions/docs/climate_displacement_litigation