Summary of holding
In considering the complaint, the Committee found violations of articles 17 and 27 of the ICCPR, and extensively analysed the following alleged rights’ violations:
- Right to life (article 6)
While underlining the positive obligations of State parties to protect their citizens from reasonably foreseeable threats including adverse climate change impacts, the Committee still noted that the petitioners did not indicate the individual nature of their risk their right to life being endangered. Although “the conditions of life in such a country may become incompatible with the right to life with dignity before the risk is realized,” the Committee still suggested that Australia could intervene in the next 10-15 years to protect and relocate the Islanders. Therefore, the there was no violation of their right to life.
- Freedom from interference to privacy, family, home (article 17)
Australia violated the petitioners’ rights under article 17 as the State party failed to address the Islanders’ requests to update seawalls over the last decades and did not justify the delay in building new ones. Severe inundations of villages and ancestral burial lands compromised culturally important ceremonies on traditional lands, including visits to ancestral graveyards, and generated anxiety in the community about the lands’ habitability, thus constituting “foreseeable and serious violations of private and family life and the home” (para 8.12).
- Right to culture of minorities (article 27)
As for the same inaction and delay in initiating adaptation projects, Australia violated the right to culture of the indigenous group. Climate change impacts have eroded indigenous traditional lands, which are strictly interlinked with the cultural integrity of the community, whose cultural practices can only be performed on the islands’ territory. The State party failed to protect “the authors’ collective ability to maintain their traditional way of life, to transmit to their children and future generations their culture and traditions and use of land and sea resources discloses a violation of the State party’s positive obligation to protect the authors’ right to enjoy their minority culture.”
Potential takeaways for future climate migration litigation
- The Committee recognised a violation of the right to culture of minority groups and right to family and home in the context of the effects of climate change, stressing the importance of cultural ties with traditional lands of the islanders. Following the Committee’s reflections, future climate migration litigation can reference cultural rights, as protected by article 27 in cases involving minority groups, or article 1 when considering the right to self-determination and cultural development. Climate change impacts and State inaction have a direct repercussion on the ability of those affected to develop and practice cultural traditions, maintain traditional ways of life, and enjoy their relationship with ancestral lands.
- The decision sheds light on the intergenerational nature of the right to culture, as it stressed the State party’s positive obligation to protect the collective ability to transmit cultural traditions to future generations, especially for those communities which are more exposed to climate change.
- Reflections of the Committee on the protection of right to life include State party obligations to protect alleged victims from ongoing and future climate threats, including relocation, where necessary. This is fertile ground for future climate migration claims that might corroborate States’ obligations to enable relocation for communities at risk, in consultation with those directly affected.