In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Environmental Law

01 Apr

[Juliana Moreira Mendonça (Brazil) is a visiting researcher at the Department of Security Studies of Georgetown University, a Public Defender in Rio de Janeiro State and Associate Personnel at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Professor Claudia Martin (Argentina) is the Co-Director of the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and Professorial Lecturer in Residence at American University Washington College of Law. She...

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18 Mar

[Vanessa Murphy and Helen Obregón Gieseken are Legal Advisers at the Legal Division of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva] At the 34th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in October 2024, Nigeria and European Union Member States pledged, among other things, to consider acceding to the Convention on the Prohibition of Military Use of...

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17 Mar

[Dr Sergey Sayapin is Professor of Law at KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan) and Distinguished Visiting Global Scholar at the NUS Centre for International Law (2025)] Climate change has long been framed as a problem of the future – a looming catastrophe that international law was expected to prevent before it arrived. That framing is now increasingly untenable. Climate collapse is no...

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03 Mar

[Dr. Juan-Pablo Peréz-León-Acevedo is a DPhil in Law candidate and a tutor at the University of Oxford. He also teaches at the Universities of Reading, Southampton, Oslo, and Abo Akademi (Finland)] While the ICJ’s Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change Advisory Opinion (ICJ-AO) has been extensively analysed, this post examines an issue that remains largely unexplored, namely, how the ICJ-AO and a specific domestic...

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02 Mar

[Aikaterini [Katerina] Tsampi is Assistant Professor of International Law at the University of Groningen and Rapporteur of the International Law Association (ILA) Study Group on “International Law, Human Rights and Islands”] On 28 January 2026 the District Court of The Hague (Court) issued its first-instance judgment in Greenpeace Netherlands v. The State of the Netherlands (the original Dutch text). The claimant...

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13 Feb

[Mohit Khubchandani is an International Disputes Resolution Attorney and PhD candidate at Leiden Law School, writing his PhD on "Forum and harm specific metrics of compensation for environmental damages (MCES) for major international courts and tribunals. Jason Rudall is Associate Professor of Public International Law at Leiden University.] Introduction The ICJ has handed down 3 of its 4 judgments in contentious cases on the question...

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19 Jan

[Debora N. Gunawan is an SJD student at the University of Michigan Law School] In late November 2025, a wave of torrential rains, cyclones, and monsoon-driven storms battered South and Southeast Asia. Devastating floods, landslides, and mudslides ravaged wide swathes of the region, from Sumatra in Indonesia to southern Malaysia, southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, and even the Philippines and Vietnam. Reports...

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09 Jan

[Maud Sarliève and Dr Pauline Martini are associate research fellows at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London] On 4 December 2025, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) launched its groundbreaking Policy on Addressing Environmental Damage under the Rome Statute: severe environmental harm can now be prosecuted as an international crime. This document represents...

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01 Dec

[Sude Kınık is a legal trainee at Kabine Law Office in Istanbul, Turkey] The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered its latest climate change judgment, Greenpeace Nordic and Others v. Norway on October 28th, following closely in the footsteps of its decision in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland. In this new case, the Court reaffirmed and applied the...

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19 Nov

[This interview was conducted by Dr Stephanie Triefus, a researcher at the Asser Institute and Academic Coordinator for the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research]  The Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture is an occasion for reflection on pressing questions of international law and is the Asser Institute’s flagship activity. Each year, the Asser Institute invites a distinguished scholar or practitioner to share...

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12 Nov

[Omar Grech is Associate Professor within the Department of International Law, University of Malta] Several excellent posts on this blog have already explored different facets of the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on Climate Change, including its treatment of state responsibility and obligations erga omnes. This post takes a different tack. It argues that the Opinion marks a doctrinal breakthrough for the concept...

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07 Nov

[Amir Abbas Kiani is a collaborating researcher in International Law at Shiraz University, Iran] On July 23, 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its ‘historic’ Advisory Opinion on Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change. As part of its reasoning, the Court examined the issue of lex specialis derogat legi generali (lex specialis) to determine “…the relationship between...

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