Julian Aguon wore a darkish blue swimsuit and garland manufactured from white coconut fronds, brown hibiscus tree bark, and brown cowry shells. Underneath the arched ceilings and chandeliers of the Peace Palace in The Hague, he stepped to the rostrum to make his case to the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice.
“The suitable to self-determination is a cornerstone of the worldwide authorized order,” Aguon advised the 15 judges who make up the courtroom. “But local weather change, and the conduct answerable for it, has already infringed the fitting to self-determination for the various peoples of Melanesia.”
The Worldwide Courtroom of Justice, or ICJ, usually hears disputes over lands and waters between international locations, however typically it takes on instances of broader international resonance. This was one in every of them: Aguon was arguing on behalf of Pacific island nations hundreds of miles away that hope to carry accountable the international locations most answerable for local weather change. The 42-year-old legal professional from Guam spent 5 years working towards this second, alongside together with his co-counsel, Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh. Now, he sought to underscore what was at stake.
“The peoples of Melanesia stay exceptionally near the Earth, and thus really feel the vandalism visited upon it acutely,” he stated. “Furthermore, theirs represents residing, respiration different imaginations — imaginations apart from the one which has introduced this planet to the brink of ecological collapse. Thus, guaranteeing they can stay and thrive of their ancestral areas is of the utmost significance, and never just for themselves, however for all of humanity.”
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Aguon grew up on Guam, the son of a plumber and a social employee. His childhood consisted of enjoying in jungles together with his cousins, the place elders warned them to keep away from something steel in case it was leftover ordnance from World Conflict II; household gatherings to wish the rosary within the Chamorro language; and absorbing a cultural devotion to serving one’s neighborhood. His dad labored quick stints for varied employers, together with at a naval ship restore facility, and died of pancreatic most cancers when Aguon was 9. Aguon has puzzled if his demise was associated to U.S. army air pollution.
On the time, his father’s demise led his household to disintegrate, and Aguon buried himself in books like The Home on Mango Avenue, the story of a Chicana lady rising up in Chicago — a coping mechanism that deepened his empathy and drive for justice. A quote from James Baldwin resonates with Aguon immediately: “You suppose your ache and your heartbreak are unprecedented within the historical past of the world, however then you definitely learn.”
“Grief so usually has an isolating impact that it needn’t have,” Aguon advised Grist. “I really feel like my grief has been a bridge that I’ve walked throughout to get to different individuals.”
Within the Nineteen Nineties, when Aguon was a child, an enormous hurricane hit Guam. The home windows and sliding glass door in his residence shattered, and Aguon, his brother, sister, and mom propped a mattress up of their lounge and hid behind it. Aguon remembers tracing the mattress’ embroidered flowers together with his finger because the household waited for the winds to cross. Years later, he would learn a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change that predicted the approaching of even stronger cyclones.
“At that second I used to be like, ‘Wow, we’ve already been via a lot,’” he stated. How far more excessive would the storms get? How far more would his neighborhood need to endure? “I had a very stunning sense of the dimensions.”
The case earlier than the ICJ, led by Aguon’s legislation agency, Blue Ocean Legislation, hopes to determine authorized penalties for nations which have pushed local weather change, and illuminate what obligations these international locations owe to individuals harmed.
The courtroom is being requested to supply an advisory opinion to make clear the authorized obligations of nations beneath present worldwide legislation. Aguon describes it as a request for an goal yardstick by which to measure these international locations’ actions, which might open the door to a brand new period of local weather reparations.
After Aguon and Wewerinke-Singh exited the courtroom final week, they joined a press convention earlier than the palaceʻs marble staircase close to its entrance entrance. Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s prime local weather official, advised reporters that the island nation intentionally selected Blue Ocean Legislation to signify them on the ICJ as a result of the Indigenous-led agency wouldn’t solely signify them legally, however culturally.
“This can be a case about our id as Pacific Islanders, our human rights as residents of this planet, and the tasks that states have to make sure our human rights and our cultural id and our essence and our future is protected,” Regenvanu stated.
If the ICJ delivers the advisory opinion Vanuatu is looking for, Aguon hopes Indigenous peoples will be capable to leverage that opinion in climate-related lawsuits in opposition to their governments and file human rights complaints in opposition to each international locations and companies. Given the local weather impactsIndigenous peoples are already experiencing, the stakes couldn’t be larger.
In the summertime of 2010, then-28-year-old Aguon was only a yr out of legislation college and was in search of a job after ending up a clerkship with Guam’s Supreme Courtroom. He needed to work in worldwide and human rights legislation, however no companies specialised in that on Guam, the biggest island within the Pacific area of Micronesia that’s residence to about 160,000 individuals. Nicely-established legal professionals on the island discouraged him from attempting to begin a brand new agency from scratch: Why not work for a number of years, get some extra expertise, they instructed.
“They had been proper, in some methods,” Aguon stated. “I did lack expertise, however I didn’t essentially want the expertise that they’d, as a result of I needed to do one thing completely different.”
What he envisioned was a legislation agency that would advocate on behalf of Indigenous peoples within the Pacific: communities just like the Marshallese, that are nonetheless combating for justice after a long time of U.S. nuclear testing; just like the individuals of Tuvalu, the place rising seas are threatening to remove total islands; and the Chamorros, like Aguon, the place an ever-expanding American army presence more and more stresses the island’s lands and waters.
To perform that, Aguon would should be licensed to follow legislation in a number of international locations. He spent months learning for and passing bar exams not solely on Guam, but in addition within the Marshall Islands and Palau. He opened a solo legislation follow in 2010 in a tiny workplace within the village of Hagåtña, Guam’s capital. At first he labored domestically, offering authorized counsel to Guam’s Legislature and defending the island authorities’s plans for an Indigenous-only vote on the island’s political standing. As his workload grew and his clientele expanded, he opened up Blue Ocean Legislation in 2014, and commenced to rent workers attorneys who noticed the legislation the best way he did: as a software for social change that’s each severely restricted and probably emancipatory.
“We’re a small workforce of activist legal professionals, social change legal professionals,” Aguon stated. His colleagues embody his ICJ co-lead Wewerinke-Singh, who has labored on local weather litigation throughout a number of areas and U.N. courts; Alofipo So’o alo Fleur Ramsay, a Samoan legal professional whose environmental justice work in Australia and within the Pacific has earned her mainly orator titles from two villages in Samoa; and Watna Mori, a Melanesian lawyer from Papua New Guinea whose experience in human rights and environmental legislation extends to advocacy for authorized techniques that worth Indigenous data techniques.
Blue Ocean Legislation now contains seven attorneys, whose work spans Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, the three main areas of the Pacific.
Over the following decade, Aguon argued for Guam’s proper to self-determination earlier than a U.S. federal appeals courtroom in Honolulu, defending the island’s effort to restrict a vote on Guam’s political standing to Indigenous Chamorros. (Chamorro can also be spelled CHamoru, however Aguon prefers the previous). He misplaced, and Guam has but to schedule a vote.
However Aguon remains to be happy with one side of the judges’ determination, which acknowledges a authorized distinction between racial and ancestry classifications. “Any further, for all Indigenous peoples residing beneath U.S. rule, there may be now a case that formally and comprehensively disentangles these two ideas, which signifies that Native peoples all through the nation can cite it to argue that some ancestral classifications usually are not the identical as racial classifications,” he stated.
After dropping in federal courtroom, Aguon and his workforce took their advocacy on behalf of the individuals of Guam to the United Nations. The island remains to be formally acknowledged by the U.N. as a colony, and first grew to become an American army outpost on the flip of the twentieth century. For many years, the U.S. refused to grant Chamorros U.S. citizenship, and as an alternative compelled them to stay beneath a carousel of capricious naval governors who banned all the pieces from the Chamorro language to interracial marriage to whistling.
“Legislation is the vocabulary of the highly effective in so many situations,” Aguon stated. “The U.S. army was most likely my biggest instructor in that regard.”
His agency has suggested the Marshall Islands’ authorities on its authorized choices because it continues to cope with the legacy of U.S. nuclear exams. Aguon and his colleagues have additionally labored with organizations and legislatures in Pacific international locations like Fiji to seek the advice of on the dangers of deep-sea mining.
Aguon’s workforce has filed complaints about human rights violations by the U.S. army in opposition to the Chamorro individuals with the United Nations, prompting three U.N. rapporteurs to situation a joint letter in 2021 criticizing the U.S. for denying the Chamorro individuals their proper to self-determination.
Simply final month, Blue Ocean Legislation filed a grievance with the U.N. Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples on behalf of youth from Palau who say U.S. militarization of their islands is violating their rights, together with their proper to freely consent to what occurs on their land.
“We’re persistently taking over the U.S. empire in all of those instances,” Aguon stated.
In 2006, the identical yr that Aguon went to legislation college, the U.S. army proposed an enormous enlargement of its presence on Guam, deciding to maneuver its Marine Corps base to Guam from Okinawa after native opposition to the troopers’ presence grew to become unimaginable to disregard. (On the coronary heart of the anti-military protests had been considerations about American troopers’ sexual violence in opposition to Okinawan girls and ladies, together with the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old by two Marines and a Navy sailor.)
Between the 8,000 service members, their 9,000 dependents, and the tens of hundreds of development staff and different workers wanted to create extra services for the brand new base, the army estimated there could be an inflow of 80,000 individuals on Guam, rising its inhabitants on the time by greater than half. “It’s good for the strategic pursuits of America,” retired Marine Corps Main Normal David Bice advised the Guam Chamber of Commerce in 2007. “It’s good for our pals within the Pacific, and it’s additionally good for Guam.”
The neighborhood balked. Aguon felt that the army used language to obfuscate relatively than illuminate the fact of their influence on Guam. For instance, “live-fire coaching” was a euphemism that would discuss with something from machine gun firing to large-scale bombing follow. “Environmental influence” encompassed the destruction of cultural websites relationship again greater than 1,000 years. “Readiness” referred to the army’s potential to reply to threats, nevertheless it wasn’t all the time clear whether or not the Indigenous individuals had been amongst these the U.S. cared about defending.
“The legislation is about hyper-vigilance, hyper-attentiveness to how language is getting used and deployed,” Aguon stated. “Usually it’s being weaponized in opposition to individuals most in want of this safety.”
Litigation and neighborhood protests compelled the Division of Protection to shrink its army relocation to five,000 troops, and alter the placement of its deliberate firing vary. The brand new Marine Corps base opened final yr, and a machine-gun follow vary is being constructed adjoining to a federal wildlife refuge.
Aguon sees the legislation as a single software amongst many to push again in opposition to this entrenched militarism that he sees echoed all over the world, from Honolulu to Gaza. To him, what is going to finally impact change is solidarity.
“We’re up in opposition to such enormous, gigantic, colossal forces,” Aguon stated. “I’m casting my internet of hope in that route, that the peoples of the world — from the bottom up — can actually discover simpler methods to confront these forces that we’re up in opposition to.”
In 2017, Aguon sat in Straub Hospital in Honolulu and held the hand of a longtime mentor, Marshallese chief Tony de Brum, who is understood internationally for his international management in combating local weather change. De Brum had served as a father determine after Aguon’s dad handed and helped encourage his ardour for local weather justice. “Give them hell,” de Brum stated, earlier than he too died. 4 years later, Aguon was named a Pulitzer finalist for a screed on local weather change within the Pacific: “To Hell With Drowning.”
When Vanuatu requested for his legislation agency’s assist with its local weather change case 5 years in the past, Aguon hadn’t ever argued earlier than the ICJ and wasn’t intimately accustomed to the particularities of its proceedings.
The ICJ solely accepts instances introduced by U.N. member states, and since the U.S. by no means relinquished Guam, the island territory doesn’t have the fitting to file instances there. The identical is true for numerous Indigenous nations all through the world whose borders are lacking from most maps: The best courtroom within the United Nations doesn’t have a seat for them, and so their voices are not often heard. That echoes different venues of the U.N., the place Indigenous peoples are sometimes not noted of key negotiating rooms as a result of their nations don’t have U.N. member state standing they usually lack illustration inside their colonial governments.
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“The ICJ proceedings are extra state- and international-organizations-focused, much less individuals centered, the place engagement by civil society is kind of restricted, and Indigenous peoples wouldn’t have a direct pathway for engagement within the courtroom,” stated Joie Chowdhury, a senior legal professional on the Heart for Worldwide Environmental Legislation who has additionally assisted on the local weather case. That’s in distinction to different U.N. authorized venues just like the Inter-American Courtroom of Human Rights and the Worldwide Tribunal for the Legislation of the Sea, she stated. “So there isn’t a straightforward pathway for Indigenous peoples’ engagement, and particularly on this case, that may be necessary given their large data and experience in local weather change and biodiversity.”
Generally, nongovernmental organizations could intercede, as on this ICJ case the place a dozen had been accredited to take part. Along with representing Vanuatu, Aguonʻs workforce can also be representing the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a nongovernmental group that consists of Melanesian Pacific island states. The group additionally contains the Kanak Socialist Nationwide Liberation Entrance, which represents the Indigenous Kanak individuals of New Caledonia who’re combating for independence from France.
Bringing a case earlier than the ICJ requires particular data and significant funding, and sometimes events are represented by a cottage trade of attorneys who specialize within the ICJ and are accustomed to its proceedings. That is solely the second time {that a} Pacific state has sought an advisory opinion from the ICJ. The final time was in 1996, when the Marshall Islands requested the judges to weigh in on whether or not detonating or threatening to make use of nuclear weapons violated worldwide legislation. The judges stated that it might be authorized in excessive instances of self-defense.
“Many of those international locations which have by no means argued earlier than the ICJ earlier than are literally not simply coming to argue their case, however main from the entrance,’” stated Chowdury from the Heart for Worldwide Environmental Legislation. “It’s displaying and demonstrating to the world that that is an avenue of justice.”
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Simply getting on the courtroom docket is a problem and, on this case, required getting a decision accredited by the U.N. Normal Meeting. The case was initially launched in 2019 by legislation college students on the College of the South Pacific, who took a ground-up method to persuading U.N. Normal Meeting members within the Pacific and past to formally request an ICJ advisory opinion. As their marketing campaign grew, Aguon discovered himself and his workers offering enter in any respect hours of the day each time a phrase or comma modified within the draft that circulated amongst U.N. delegates.
The case morphed into the largest-ever in ICJ’s historical past. Total, 97 international locations and 12 nongovernmental organizations are urging the courtroom to weigh in on what main polluting international locations owe to the peoples and nations who’ve been harmed by their relentless carbon emissions. Aguon spoke on the primary day, however oral arguments had been scheduled for the primary full two weeks of December. It’s not clear when an opinion can be rendered.
Within the meantime, Aguon hopes that not solely the courtroom however the world will take note of the tales that the case is revealing about the price of local weather change to Pacific peoples. Throughout the press convention close to the doorway of the Peace Palace, he advised the story of one of many villages he visited when accumulating witness testimony for the case.
“There’s a village on the mouth of a river within the Gulf province of Papua New Guinea, that’s on the transfer once more. The individuals of Vairibari, whose ancestors have lived alongside the banks of the Kikori River Delta since time immemorial, have already moved 4 occasions as a result of sea stage rise. This can be their fifth and remaining relocation. Remaining, as a result of there may be merely no extra inland to go,” Aguon stated.
“A planning committee has been shaped to deal with the logistics. Amongst different issues, the villagers are debating about how finest to relocate the stays of their deceased kinfolk, as a result of storm surges have already begun washing away the lifeless. The individuals of Vairibari need nothing greater than to remain. However local weather change is making that choice all however unimaginable.”
