Only hours remain before Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC) receive the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) advisory opinion on states’ legal duties to tackle climate change.
The ICJ’s opinion is expected to clarify what legal obligations states have to reduce emissions and protect vulnerable communities, especially in climate-exposed regions like the Pacific.
A movement born in the Pacific
The campaign began six years ago with 27 law students from the University of the South Pacific in Vanuatu. While studying environmental law under Dr Justin Rose, they were tasked with identifying the most ambitious legal tool to address climate change and protect human rights.
Reflecting on the realities in their own islands, the students concluded that an advisory opinion from the ICJ on states’ legal obligations was the most powerful instrument.
The research grew into PISFCC, a youth-led movement grounded in regional solidarity and community outreach.
Te Ao Māori News spoke to Belyndar Rikimani, who was in her first year of university at the time but went on to become a founding executive member of PISFCC, for which she is now the Awareness Chair.
The campaign gained momentum when the Vanuatu government and later the Pacific Islands Forum, formally took the proposal to the international stage. In 2023, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the resolution requesting an advisory opinion.
Youth led and rooted in the Pacific
Rikimani emphasised that this is a deep injustice that while the Pacific contributes the least to global carbon emissions, it suffers the most from climate impacts.
The power of this campaign, she says, is that it didn’t start with governments, diplomats, or experts, but with a group of law students from the Pacific.
“We didn’t wait to be invited to decision-making tables or bigger forums. We built our own platform, we built our own table,” she exclaimed.
“We are standing for the realities of what’s happening to our islands and our people back home. That has grounded us through this entire movement.”
The connection between land, ancestry and climate displacement
Rikimani hails from the Solomon Islands, where the climate struggle they face is primarily land loss due to rising sea levels.
In the last decade, communities have seen their ancestral graves taken away by the sea.
“Climate change is silently taking our ancestral lands,” she stressed.
“It’s a very hard thing for us to get our people to relocate to a new place or to a new community because it’s their homes, it’s where their grandfathers are buried.”
She went on to say that relocation is difficult when they have such a close relationship to their ancestors and because their identity cannot be separated from the land.
Rikimani is also concerned about the social issues and land disputes that would arise from relocation.
“We didn’t think we’d get this far”
“We didn’t even think that we could have gotten this far,” Rikimani said.
“A lot of people, when they heard about how ambitious the campaign was, thought it was a dead end.”
She recalled attending COP25 in Madrid, where she and fellow PISFCC leader Solomon Yeo began socialising the campaign with leaders and legal experts. Many were sceptical.
“They asked questions like, ‘How can you be sure your own government will support this movement?’”
A turning point at The Hague
When asked when she first realised the campaign had truly taken off, Rikimani said it was during the final day of oral hearings at the ICJ in December 2024
“That was the moment when the emotions hit all of us,” she said.
“When you actually felt like, ‘Oh my God, this is happening, and it is real, we are actually in the ICJ.’”
Hopes for the courts ruling
Rikimani said she hopes the court will affirm that there is a legal, not just moral, duty to limit emissions and prevent climate-related harm.
She outlined three key hopes for the outcome:
- Recognition that states have legal obligations to reduce emissions;
- Financial and technical support for vulnerable countries;
- That human rights and intergenerational equity are placed at the centre of climate justice.
“If the court delivers on those fronts, it could actually mark a landmark victory for Pacific people.”
The ICJ’s ruling will be delivered on 23 July at 3pm CEST (24 July, 1am NZT) at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.
