This week we turned back to our running series on cases before international legal bodies that involve climate change and attempts to hash out states’ obligations. For this episode we turned to the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR), which received a request for an advisory opinion concerning the obligations of states in the context of climate change.
We’ve done several episodes about other climate cases at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Court of Justice and at the European Court of Human Rights. But because this is one of those courts we don’t regularly cover, we needed all the help we could get explaining the basics to us. Luckily our guest Yusra Suedi of Manchester University knows international courts and tribunals and lectures on international environmental law and international climate change law.
The civil society organisations seeking the African court’s advisory opinion are asking the court to tackle a lot of issues. They want guidance on duties to implement adaptation, resilience, and mitigation measures in response to climate change and an obligation for countries to cooperate internationally to limit global warming to below the 1.5°C threshold. On top of that, they are looking for the court to clarify what states responsibilities to third parties are, “including international monopolies, multinational corporations, and non-state actors operating on the continent”.
With Yusra, we delve in to how the court is working and could work in this advisory opinion request and how it links up with other climate change litigation efforts like the ICJ advisory opinion case.
Yusra gave the case Ligue Ivoirienne des Droits de l’Homme (LIDHO) And Others v. Republic of Côte d’Ivoire (the LIDHO case) as her favourite court case. This 2023 judgment found that states should establish regulations to be able to hold multinational companies accountable for harms caused by dumping of toxic waste.
She is reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book Dream Count about four women, all related in some way, navigating life. As a podcast recommendation she suggests is Diary of a CEO from British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlet.
