Decision by international court of justice hailed as a gamechanger for climate justice and accountability
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n July 2025, the international court of justice delivered a landmark decision that clarified that all states were bound under international law to tackle the human-made climate crisis, which the judges unanimously concluded posed an “urgent and existential threat” to the planet’s life-sustaining systems and therefore humanity itself.
The ICJ advisory opinion built on rulings from hundreds of climate lawsuits across the world over the past decade or more, and added further legal weight to strong decisions from the inter-American court of human rights in July 2025 and the international tribunal on the law of the sea in May 2024.
But the ICJ case in particular, which brought the world’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court, has been hailed as a gamechanger for climate justice and accountability. It made clear that the established legal duty to do no harm, particularly transboundary environmental harm, was universal and not contingent on a country’s ratification or membership of formal treaties such as the Paris agreement, from which Donald Trump withdrew on his first day back in the White House.
