In landmark opinion, World Court says countries must address climate change
The International Court of Justice said failure by countries to meet their climate obligations could, in specific cases, lead other states affected by climate change to litigate.
The opinion by the ICJ, also known as the World Court, was immediately welcomed by environmental groups. Legal experts said it was a victory for small island and low-lying states that had asked the court to clarify states' responsibilities.
Judge Yuji Iwasawa said countries were obliged to comply with the "stringent obligations" placed on them by climate treaties and failure to do so was a breach of international law.
"States must cooperate to achieve concrete emission reduction targets," Iwasawa said, as he read out the court's advisory opinion.
He said that national climate plans must be of the highest ambition and collectively maintain standards to meet the aims of the 2015 Paris Agreement that include attempting to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).
Under international law, he said: "The human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is essential for the enjoyment of other human rights."
Earlier, as he started a just over two-hour reading of the court's opinion, Judge Iwasawa laid out the cause of the problem and the need for a collective response.
"Greenhouse gas emissions are unequivocally caused by human activities which are not territorially limited," he said.
Historically, rich industrialised countries have been responsible for the most emissions. Iwasawa said these countries had to take the lead in addressing the problem.
The deliberation of the 15 judges of the ICJ in The Hague is non-binding, but it carries legal and political weight and future climate cases would be unable to ignore it, legal experts say.
"This is the start of a new era of climate accountability at a global level," said Danilo Garrido, legal counsel for Greenpeace.
Sebastien Duyck, senior attorney, at the Center For International Environmental Law laid out the possibility of big emitters being sued.
"If states have legal duties to prevent climate harm, then victims of that harm have a right to redress," he said.
Wednesday's opinion follows two weeks of hearings last December at the ICJ when the judges were asked by the U.N. General Assembly to consider two questions: what are countries' obligations under international law to protect the climate from greenhouse gas emissions; and what are the legal consequences for countries that harm the climate system?
Wealthy countries of the Global North told the judges that existing climate treaties, including the 2015 Paris Agreement, which are largely non-binding, should be the basis for deciding their responsibilities.
Developing nations and small island states at greatest risk from rising sea levels argued for stronger measures, in some cases legally binding, to curb emissions and for the biggest emitters of climate-warming greenhouse gases to provide financial aid.
They had sought clarification from the court after the failure so far of the 2015 Paris Agreement to curb the growth of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Late last year, in the "Emissions Gap Report," which takes stock of countries' promises to tackle climate change compared with what is needed, the U.N. said that current climate policies will result in global warming of more than 3 C (5.4 F) above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
As campaigners seek to hold companies and governments to account, climate‑related litigation has intensified, with nearly 3,000 cases filed across almost 60 countries, according to June figures from London's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
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Daily Mail
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Small boat migrants who lodge human rights claims will DODGE removal to France under Labour's new scheme
Small boat migrants who lodge human rights claims in Britain will evade being returned to France under a massive loophole in Labour's new deal. They will be ruled out of new deportation measures if legal claims are outstanding or if they claim to be under 18, it emerged. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the human rights loophole would be 'ruthlessly exploited' by lawyers. A new treaty with President Emmanuel Macron 's government, published today, also disclosed the British taxpayer will foot the bill for both sides of the deal, which will see migrants who came here illegally across the Channel exchanged 'one for one' with others still in France. Migrants in France will be flown to Britain by the Home Office and handed a visa to live here for up to three months after successfully applying, while their final application is considered. Officials insisted there will be 'rigorous' security checks even though the French will not hand over any personal details on migrants coming here – including any criminal records they may hold on them. The first small boat arrivals could be detained as early as tomorrow for possible removal to France. However, the details of the treaty open up the prospect of human rights lawyers encouraging migrants to lodge spurious claims simply to avoid being earmarked for removal. Under the terms of the agreement the Home Office will confirm after selecting a migrant that 'at the time of their transfer that person will not have an outstanding human rights claim'. It also sets out how removals will be blocked if a migrant has outstanding legal challenges or has obtained an injunction from a court which bars their removal. There was confusion over a further clause referring to human rights claims which have been ruled by Home Office caseworkers to be 'clearly unfounded'. Mr Philp said the drafting of the clause showed even 'clearly unfounded' claims would successfully block deportation – but the Home Office disputed his reading of the text. A migrant attempts to board a dinghy off Gravelines beach, near Dunkirk, last week As it was unveiled for the first time less than a month ago, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer hailed the deal as 'groundbreaking' and promised small boats migrants would be 'detained and returned to France in short order'. Mr Philp said: 'This deal is likely to be completely unworkable and will be ruthlessly exploited by human rights lawyers to prevent people being returned to France. 'Even a 'clearly unfounded' human rights claim will stop a return to France while it goes through a lengthy court process.' He added: 'This deal has no numbers in it - presumably because they are so small. 'And the deal says that France will not provide any information at all about those they are sending to the UK - so they could be criminals or terrorists and we wouldn't know. 'This is a bad deal, which won't work.' The treaty confirmed any migrant who claims to be an 'unaccompanied minor' will not be deported. There has been a series of cases in recent years which have seen asylum seekers falsely claim to be under 18. The UK will fund flights from France for migrants selected to come here under the scheme, the treaty went on, as well as paying for migrants to be removed. Home Office officials who accompany migrants on removals flights will not be allowed to use physical force in France, prompting questions about their safety aboard the aircraft. Both France and the UK will be able to suspend the deal with just one week's notice – and fully terminate it with one month's notice. Separate documents revealed migrants brought to the UK as part of the deal will be barred from working or accessing benefits during the initial three month period, while the Home Office considers whether it will grant a longer visa. It is unclear where the migrants will be housed, however, opening the prospect of them being placed in taxpayer-funded hotels. The number of people accepted from France will have a 'cap' equal to the number of small boat migrants who are sent back under the deal, the documents showed. But the Home Office was unable to confirm the level of the cap. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper repeatedly refused to say how many migrants will be returned under the deal because it 'could help the smuggling gangs'. Last month it was suggested the scheme would see 50 migrants a week sent back to France. At that rate, just 2,200 would be returned before the agreement expires on June 11 next year By comparison, a record 25,436 migrants have reached Britain by small boat since the start of the year, up 49 per cent on the same period last year. Meanwhile, pro-migrant groups have already indicated they are prepared to bring legal challenges against the new policy – just as they did against the previous Conservative government's Rwanda asylum deal. Steve Valdez-Symonds of Amnesty International UK said: 'We anticipate that this deal is likely to face legal challenges from people who quite reasonably will resist being swapped around like mere fodder rather than addressing the claim for asylum they have made.'
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Our complicit elite is to blame for every sexual assault by an illegal migrant
I was having coffee in the garden with John, the lovely man who comes to help me with all the jobs I can't manage (a temperamental pond pump and rampant blanket weed among them), when conversation turned to John's concern for his daughter. Kirstie's journey to college takes her past a former RAF base now occupied by illegal migrants who crossed the Channel in small boats. Their ranks have swollen recently to several hundred as the Government struggles to fulfil its promise to empty asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament. Not by deporting the legions of undocumented young males from Africa and the Middle East – of course not, silly! – but by secretly redistributing a majority of those migrants from hotels into HMOs (houses in multiple occupation) and military facilities, presumably in the hope that the public will be less likely to notice and kick off. But girls like Kirstie cannot fail to notice. Not when the foreign males who leer and hiss at them, as if they were living in Egypt not Essex, now outnumber the population of their village. Not when it is girls who were born here who are advised to change their behaviour to accommodate the culture of the new arrivals by being less provocative, and walking a different way to school. Lately John, like a lot of fathers I suspect, has started fearing the worst. 'We were talking in the pub the other night and we decided that, in the end, it's men like us who will have to go down and defend our southern border,' he said to me that day in the garden. The bees went about their buzzy business in the hollyhocks, there was a gentle trickle of water in the pond, its pump just mended by this good and reliable man. It was a quintessential English summer's day, temperate and benign as the people of these islands tend to be until roused, yet there we were, drinking our coffee and picturing thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Johns, the backbone of our country, the sturdy yeomen who have always come to the rescue in centuries past, marching to the beaches of Kent to protect us against invasion. To protect their women and children. That may sound alarmist, apocalyptic even, but is it really? When men like John are discussing in Wetherspoons what normal people can clearly see is a national emergency, no online Starmer-Stasi snoopers can stop them much, though a panic-stricken, authoritarian government would like to shut down free speech. Things that we would once have thought unimaginable, indeed completely bonkers, now feel like weekly, almost hourly, occurrences. Over 25,000 migrants, mostly young males, have already broken into Britain this year (49 per cent more than at the same point last year), and the nation that launched the D-Day landings against a mighty foe is now reliant on a spell of bad weather to keep the numbers down. Or on the latest doomed government 'one-in-one-out' scheme, beginning today, in which France generously allows herself to be bribed at British taxpayers' expense to take back maybe one of the 700 migrants who make the crossing in a single day, only to send the UK a substitute asylum seeker. Probably not a brain surgeon, to take a wild guess. Not only will such a tiny chance of being deported fail to act as a deterrent, it allows Labour to slyly open up a legal route into the UK while pretending it's a benefit to us. What would those who gave their lives in 1944 think of us – from Operation Overlord to Operation Over-Run in 80 years? Since the 2015-2016 New Years's Eve celebrations in Cologne, when around 1,200 women were raped or sexually assaulted by gangs of foreign men, I have warned repeatedly of the consequences of admitting young males from backward, misogynist cultures into a liberal, Western society. Naturally, telling the truth got me called 'racist' and I earned a coveted place on an Islamophobia list. But the pretence that a farmer from Afghanistan suddenly turns into Hugh Grant the minute his trainers hit the shingle at Dover was always a progressive fantasy. Sex-starved lads raised to regard women as livestock (Afghan women are no longer allowed to speak outside the home let alone go to school) are poor candidates for integration. They were always going to take gross liberties with our liberty. And so here we are. In leafy Nuneaton, a 12-year-old girl was allegedly raped by two Afghan asylum seekers. Despite Warwickshire Police's best (make that worst) attempts to conceal their identity, Ahmad Mulakhil, 23, was charged last week with rape, while Mohammad Kabir, 23, was charged with kidnap, strangulation and aiding and abetting rape. The police explained they did not wish to reveal the suspects' immigration status for fear of exacerbating our old friend 'community tensions'. In this case, community tensions is code for furious parents who strangely don't want their daughters abducted, their innocence torn from them by barbarians who shouldn't be here in the first place. In another incident on July 13, a Sudanese man who was living in a three-star asylum hotel in the upmarket Cheshire suburb of Wilmslow allegedly tried to lure away a girl aged 10 while she was with her father. Epping, meanwhile, has seen fierce protests after an Ethiopian, who had only come ashore eight days earlier and was being put up at the Bell Hotel, was charged with the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl. These alleged attacks are not an aberration; they are exactly what you would expect if you were to drop a gang of marauding vikings into a high-school prom at an all-girls' school. That has, effectively, been the policy of successive British governments. Our political class prefers to burnish their reputation among 'our international partners' by remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), making deportations almost impossible, while young girls – catcalled, groped, raped, strangled, abducted – are just thought of as unfortunate collateral damage. If they think about them at all. When it was disclosed recently that a superinjunction had been taken out by the last Conservative government to cover up importing thousands of Afghans into the UK, following a leak of names, I was berated on X by former defence minister Ben Wallace for daring to suggest that that underhand humanitarian mission could raise the level of risk for British women and girls. Mr Wallace thought the noble purpose of extricating men who may (or may not) have aided our armed forces was what mattered. I disagreed, foreseeing ever more rapes and cultural disintegration. A fate also predicted with some urgency, I notice, by US vice president JD Vance who last week accused Europe of 'engaging in civilisational suicide'. Coincidentally, a reader in Wiltshire got in touch to report how all those Afghans resettled in a local army camp are getting on. 'It's horrific, Allison,' she said. 'The behaviour of the Afghans in Larkhill – loitering around children's playgrounds, lads 'messing' with girls on school buses, human faeces regularly found on dog walks in camp. The GP practice is closed to soldiers one day a week to allow the migrants exclusive access. The reception staff have been handed crib sheets on how to greet Afghans in their own language. They are incensed. 'Why aren't the immigrants given crib sheets on how to address us in our own language?' ' My source says the Afghan families have been allocated most of the large houses, while soldiers who are entitled to bigger quarters are told 'there isn't a three-bed house in the whole of Wiltshire'. It's no surprise to learn that 'resentment is massive. The Afghans get free food – the truck goes round at least twice a day. 'If you drive through the camp you'd think you were in Kabul – groups of several men walking ahead of the women all covered in head-to-toe niqabs. Since the news of the superinjunction broke, they've been put under curfew. All the lads were warned that if they spoke out they'd be put on a charge.' See how the state acts to cover up its crimes against the British people. Whether it's silencing squaddies deprived of their rightful quarters or threatening with arrest those marvellous mums and grandmothers in raucously defiant pink who performed the Hokey-Cokey before staging a sit-in outside the Britannia Hotel asylum centre in Canary Wharf. It is politicians and senior civil servants who should be arrested, I reckon. They waste stupefying amounts of our money on people unlikely to ever make a net contribution to Britain and call it compassion. For whom? The National Audit Office has just predicted that, within 10 years, the cost of asylum accommodation will reach £15.3bn. It is intolerable. Imagine all the good such a sum could do to help struggling businesses and boost employment for our young people. Even when the popular sense of anger is palpable, as it is right now, the ability of our ruling class and much of the media to deny any adverse consequences of immigration is astonishing. I listened with mounting anger to Radio 4's PM programme on Monday (Sorry, mea culpa. I know you've told me to ditch the BBC!) where a reporter was trying to discredit data which showed that 40 per cent of sexual crimes in London were committed by foreign nationals. That, he explained, was only because migrants tend to be younger, and young men are most likely to commit those offences. I'm sure that will be a huge comfort to the traumatised women. All credit to Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick for causing consternation among the Open Borders fanatics by making the link between out-of-control migration and soaring rape figures. Compare the response of our woefully weak Prime Minister who wants to 'put pressure' on police chiefs to be 'as transparent as possible' about the ethnic background and immigration status of those charged with crimes such as rape and sexual assault. Even though it is the Crown Prosecution Service, which Sir Keir Starmer once ran, that refuses to keep track of the number of sexual offences by asylum seekers. We know why, don't we? Government sources said they hoped greater transparency would 'help rebuild the public trust'. As if. That's the same government which is mounting unprecedented and sinister surveillance to keep track of 'anti-migrant' opinion. Fifty million people will shortly be helping the police with their enquiries. 'If you come here illegally on a small boat you will face return,' Sir Keir Starmer warbled at migrants yesterday. Not, 'You will be deported immediately' but 'you will face return.' Or, let's face it and far more likely, 'You will be handed a free phone and free accommodation which we will pinch from a soldier's family if we have to.' Compare with Greece, which has set up secure camps to detain all illegal migrants for three months, all of them denied the ability to claim asylum. Emergency legislation is allowing Greeks to circumvent the ECHR. Denmark, another ECHR member, has practically closed the borders and is using gated detention camps, some housing up to 2,000 migrants who are allowed out for just two hours a day and cannot work. If a government wants to put its citizens first, it can. Ours doesn't. From now on, I suggest we put the blame for every rape, abduction and strangling by an illegal migrant squarely where it belongs – on the Government, Home Office civil servants and complicit media class. We don't want a one-in-one-out scheme, thanks all the same. We want a 50,000-in-50,000-out scheme. We want Kirstie and every girl like her to be able to walk unmolested to school, not to be hissed at by men who lack all respect for our values and our women. If our leaders are too weak to act, lovely John and the yeomen of Britain will go to the border, and they will do what needs to be done.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Report: Putin could end aerial bombardment of Ukraine to avoid Trump sanctions
Russia is considering ending its aerial bombardment of Ukraine to avoid US trade sanctions on Friday, according to reports. The Kremlin would continue waging the conflict but would desist from rocket attacks on Ukraine's cities which serve no military purpose. This would be the first concession granted by Russia since the conflict began three and a half years ago, it if transpires. The Russian plot was reported by Bloomberg last night as US peace envoy Steve Witkoff was expected to travel to Moscow for talks. He is expected to hold urgent discussions with senior Kremlin officials today [Wednesday] in a bid to bring Russia to the negotiating table. Russia could face economic sanctions from Friday, affecting itself and trading partners such as China and India, unless Vladimir Putin agrees to talks. President Trump initially gave President Putin 50 days to strike a peace deal then cut the time to '10 to 12 days'. Ahead of the deadline, Russia has pulled out of a nuclear missile agreement intended to limit numbers of short to medium range missiles in Europe. Witkoff has been criticised for the tone of his previous visits to Russia. At times he has appeared fawning in Putin's presence and has failed to secure any concessions. After one meeting earlier this year, Putin presented Witkoff with a portrait of President Trump to take back to the White House. Yesterday afternoon [Tues], Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on social media he has spoken President Trump. But he did not mention the deadline. President Zelensky described their conversation as 'productive' with the 'key focus of course being ending the war'. He added Ukraine and the United States have 'coordinated our positions' while the Russians have 'intensified the brutality of their attacks'. President Trump's plan is to hit Russia with 'secondary tariffs' in a bid to end the war. These will punish states that purchase Russian energy supplies, making it more expensive for these countries to sell goods into the United States. As a major importer of Russian oil, India is particularly vulnerable. Its government has protested the unfairness of the strategy, claiming India's critics also import Russian goods. Trump has accused of India of 'fueling [Russia's] war machine'. India has called the 100 per cent secondary tariffs 'unjustified and unreasonable'. Ukraine claimed earlier this week that it has found Indian-made components inside Russian attack drones fired at its cities. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also said to be personally close to Putin. They appear to share a warm relationship and are economic allies. Putin is widely expected to ignore Trump's deadline. While the US President has repeatedly excused Putin's failure to agree peace terms. But with President Trump under pressure in the US over his connections to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, he may adopt a tougher stance towards Putin. President Trump signalled his intent last week by publicly stating he had repositioned a pair of US nuclear submarines closer to Russia to keep the Kremlin in check. Russia responded strongly declaring it was pulling out of a nuclear missile agreement due to 'destabilising actions' by Western powers.
