The ICTs as the Climate Change Sentinels: Three Advisory Opinions & Beyond

Abstract

This Preface to the EPL Special Issue 55 (6) 2025 on the Advisory Opinions (2024-2025) of the International Courts and Tribunals (ICTs) on Climate Change seeks to provide an overview and serves as a lead research article to introduce the legal trajectory adopted for seeking an authoritative view on the “obligations of the States” under international law and “legal consequences under these obligations for States” (worded differently before each ICT) in relation to climate change from the three ICTs. The three marathon processes for seeking Advisory Opinions (AOs) took place before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). The fourth one is pending (since May 02, 2025) before the African Court of Human & Peoples’ Rights. The respective ‘requests’ were presented to these ICTs on May 29, 2023 (ICJ), January 9, 2023 (IACtHR) and December 12, 2022 (ITLOS). After going through their procedural craft of formal requests, written statements, oral presentations and specially arranged meetings (by the ICJ) with some stakeholders such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the three ICTs delivered their respective AOs on July 23, 2025 (ICJ, The Hague), July 03, 2025 (IACtHR, San Jose) and May 21, 2024 (ITLOS, Hamburg). Thus, the AOs of these three ICTs provide a unique legal corpus ostensibly for strengthening legal basis of the State-centric consensual regime (1992 UNFCCC, 1997 Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement) on climate change. These AOs have brought to the fore role of the ICTs as ‘sentinels’ even as entire climate change global regulatory process (1992-2025) seem to be floundering after 33 years in spite of grim scientific projections about the “climate emergency”. It is in this backdrop that this preface-cum-research article provides the context, a preliminary overview of the outcomes of the three ICT AOs and possible future trajectory to resolve the “climate conundrum”, beyond the three AOs.