Experts are saying the judgment handed down by the UN committee is the first of its kind and represents a “legal tipping-point” that opens the door to future protection claims for people whose lives are threatened by the impacts of the climate crisis.
The Guardian notes that tens of millions of people are expected to be displaced by global heating in the next decade.
The judgment in this case runs to 17 pages and centers on the case of Ioane Teitiota, whose home – the Pacific Island of Kiribati – is threatened by rising sea levels.
In Mr. Teitiota’s case, he applied for refugee status in New Zealand in 2013, reports the BBC, claiming his and his family’s lives were at risk. According to the evidence given to the UN committee, the island of South Tarawa had become overcrowded, from a population of 1,641 in 1947 to 50,000 in 2010 due to rising sea levels forcing people on other islands to abandon their homes when they became uninhabitable.
Mr. Teitiota also described the difficulty people on the island had getting freshwater, as well as the difficulty in growing crops due to the salinity of the water table causing serious health issues. He then said that Kiribati was projected to be uninhabitable in “10 to 15 years.”
UN Ruling and what it means
The New Zealand courts had rejected Teitiota’s claim for protection. The UN committee sided with New Zealand and ruled against Teitiota on the basis that his life was not at imminent risk.
In the ruling, the committee said that while “sea-level rise is likely to render the republic of Kiribati uninhabitable … the timeframe of 10 to 15 years, as suggested by [Teitiota], could allow for intervening acts by the republic of Kiribati, with the assistance of the international community, to take affirmative measures to protect and, where necessary, relocate its population”.
According to CTV News Canada, this ruling is important because of the way it is worded and because of additional comments in ruling. Basically, the ruling points out that member states (countries) could violate people’s international rights if they force them back to countries where climate change poses an immediate threat.
“Given that the risk of an entire country becoming submerged underwater is such an extreme risk, the conditions of life in such a country may become incompatible with the right to life with dignity before the risk is realized,” the ruling added.
In other words, according to the Human Rights Committee, it is up to countries around the globe to take rising sea-levels seriously as the number of people forced from their homes becomes a mass migration.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified Teitiota’s home nation of Kiribati as one of the six Pacific Island countries most threatened by rising sea levels. The nation of Kiribati could be underwater by 2050.
