Nikenike Vurobaravu presides over a small country with a huge influence on climate diplomacy.
Rising sea levels threaten the very existence of its Pacific island nation of Vanuatu and its population of just over 300,000 people. His best defense, he says, is to speak up creatively in international diplomatic conversations.
Since Vanuatu, in 1991, the idea emerged that industrialized countries should pay for the irreversible climate-induced damage faced by developing countries like yours. Last month, at the United Nations climate talks in Egypt, an agreement was reached, after 30 years of negotiations, to establish a fund that would help poor countries cope with climate loss and damage.
Earlier this year, Vurobaravu used the podium of the UN General Assembly to demand, for the first time, a “non-proliferation treaty” on fossil fuels.
Now, he’s posting Vanuatu’s most provocative suggestion yet. He wants the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest judicial body, based in The Hague, to assess whether governments have “legal obligations” to protect people from climate hazards and, more importantly, whether the Failure to comply with those obligations could bring “legal consequences” under existing international law. In short, you are asking the court to say whether countries can be sued for climate inaction.
“We think outside the box,” said Vurobaravu, a calm-spoken man whose gray-down mustache gives him the appearance of a sad-face emoji, though he is anything but. As a small country that historically hasn’t been important, as he said, Vanuatu has learned to innovate. “If you try to proceed the way others do things, I don’t think we would have gotten very far,” he said.
The draft resolution has been co-sponsored by 17 other countries, including at least one industrialized nation with a large share of historical emissions: Germany. Neither the United States nor China have endorsed it.
Diplomacy may well be Vanuatu’s only defence. Vanuatu has no army and no valuable commodity except tuna, which is moving further and further away from Vanuatu’s territorial waters as the oceans warm.
Vanuatu’s draft resolution seeking a legal opinion from the International Court of Justice was submitted for discussion in mid-November in the General Assembly. Negotiations on every word and comma are expected in the coming months, with a vote potentially in early 2023. To be adopted, the resolution needs a majority of the 193 member countries in the General Assembly. The votes of superpowers and small nations count equally.
He met with the Deputy Prime Minister of #Vanuatu Sato Kilman on the sidelines of the #OACPS Summit.
We agreed that SIDS are stronger when they work together.
Climate change, sustainable development and multidimensional vulnerability were discussed. pic.twitter.com/U5SJrm7mNA
— Abdulla Shahid (@abdulla_shahid) December 8, 2022
To understand Vanuatu’s exceptionally large role, it is necessary to understand its unique history.
The islands, inhabited by its indigenous Melanesian people since the 6th century B.C. C., were ruled jointly by Great Britain and France for almost 100 years. Europeans were drawn to Vanuatu sandalwood in the early 19th century, and later to its land and work. The settlers established cotton plantations, then coffee, bananas, and coconuts.
Vanuatu gained independence in 1980.
It was then that Vurobaravu, who trained as a lawyer, became a diplomat. He created the foreign service of his country.
In 1981, when Vanuatu took a seat in the General Assembly, his friend, Robert Van Lierop, an American filmmaker turned lawyer, became his first envoy to the United Nations. Vanuatu helped create the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS, which has since become an influential 39-country bloc in global climate negotiations. Van Lierop proposed a “loss and damage” mechanism in 1991, while a UN climate convention was being negotiated.
A #COP27 President of #VanuatuHE Nikenike Vurobaravu has made an impassioned appeal to world leaders to vote for an ICJ Climate Resolution in the @UNITED NATIONS GA, to place human rights at the center of decision-making on climate change.
Read more: https://t.co/nQy6FUWZyV pic.twitter.com/erD21GLwKD—SPREP (@SprepChannel) November 10, 2022
The idea to seek a legal opinion from the International Court of Justice came from a group of law students four years ago, Vurobaravu said. By then, the capital of Vanuatu had been hit by a Category 5 cyclone, Pam. Entire towns were wiped out. Destroyed crops. It was blamed on an early warning system that kept the death toll low: 11 people were killed.
Vurobaravu is now a grandfather of two. “The impacts of climate change are getting worse,” he said. “When I look at their faces and think about what it will be like when they are 20, when they are 30?”
Category 4 and 5 cyclones are now common, and the cyclone season, which runs from November to March, is also the planting season for Vanuatu’s subsistence farmers. The last major cyclone, in 2020, hit his home island of Malo. For nearly a year, the people of Malo relied on aid.
Six villages have already been relocated to four islands. The drinking water has turned saline and they are no longer habitable. Cyclones and warmer ocean waters have destroyed coral reefs and the fish on which many people lived. Dengue and malaria are on the rise.
That’s why when law students suggested investigating whether existing international laws could be used to protect future generations, Vurobaravu said, he couldn’t simply reject them. In his culture, he told her, the elderly have obligations.
“They are asking the government leadership, they are asking the regional leadership, they are asking the international leadership to fulfill their obligation,” he said.
Last month, Vurobaravu sat in a small room in a crowded and noisy convention center in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where climate talks were taking place, and reflected on the demands of generations younger. He said he heard them ask, “How come you’re drunk on fossil fuels?”
The campaign for a legal opinion is complicated by geopolitics. A similar effort made more than a decade ago by two other Pacific island nations, the Marshall Islands and Palau, went nowhere, largely due to opposition from more powerful countries. (The United States has authority over the defense and security of both countries, and the US Army has a missile defense site in the Marshall Islands.)
Vanuatu’s geopolitical relations are different. China is stepping up its diplomatic influence in the Pacific, including with Vanuatu, which is introducing Chinese language instruction in its schools. Australia is its largest trading partner and the nation is defended by Australia, New Zealand and France.
It has its diplomatic eggs in many baskets, and its president said he was not worried about pressure from rich, industrialized countries to drop the campaign for an international legal opinion. “If they threaten us, do we stop? Will this stop? I doubt it, ma’am,” he said.
The draft resolution asks the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, to assess existing laws, such as covenants on cultural rights and the Law of the Sea, to consider whether they protect current and future generations from climate hazards. A handful of national courts have already ruled in favor of the activists’ claims, relying in part on international law.
“An ICJ decision could be the most authoritative statement to date of the obligations that international law imposes on states to control their greenhouse gas emissions,” said Michael Gerrard, a law professor at the University of California Law School. Columbia, which participated in the earlier effort. by Palau and the Marshall Islands.
To hear Vurobaravu tell it, Vanuatu’s diplomatic strategy has been shaped by its history. Great Britain and France, rival powers, could never agree on most things related to the government of Vanuatu.
Vanuatu, he said, had to devise strategies that the largest and most powerful countries would not have to follow. “We had to learn to manage our insignificance. And I know it sounds kind of cheesy and funny, but our people had to do that for 75 years, she said. “We still do.”
