By Steven van Hoogstraten
At the reception for the Quatorze Juillet, the French ambassador H.E. Francois Alabrune said in his speech that the Hague was “the city for international law and for multilateral diplomacy”. He made his statement in the aftermath of the NATO summit in the Hague and in the presence of the Netherlands’ minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Caspar Veltkamp.
Clearly the NATO summit had been a great succes, and the Netherlands received full marks for their organisation of this historic summit. The agreement within NATO to spend substantially more on defense – individually and collectively – came at an important moment in time. Nobody can predict how and when the current conflicts will be put to rest, but it is obvious that Europe needs a powerful defence – or lethal force, according to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte – which currently it does not have. It should be added that the financial consequences of the deal in the Hague are colossal, I have no other word for it. The agreed increase in pure defence spending from 2 to 3,5 % will lead to some 15 billion euro in extra expenses only in the Netherlands, every year. So will there be money for any other important areas of policy development if we want to protect the regular budgets for the known state concerns like education, and health care ? I do not see that.
Without a doubt, one of the most pressing subjects of a multilateral character is climate change. It so happened that immediatley after the NATO summit a preparatory meeting on climate change was held in the German town of Bonn, just some 300 kilometers to the east of the Hague. This meeting was focussing on the next Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change (COP) . The mood was not very positive in Bonn, with lots of fights on the agenda and on procedural matters. The Executive Secretary of the UN Climate Convention, Simon Stiell, said at the end that not enough progress was made and that world has to “go faster, further and fairer” if we want to stand a chance of keeping under 1.5 temperature rise as concluded in Paris in 2015. The next COP will be held in the city of Belem, in Brazil in November of this year, and there is a long list of important issues to be decided. Climate Justice is just one of them.
July was also the month of a groundbreaking Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the responsibilities of states for the global climate. The Advisory Opinion had been asked for by the General Assembly of the UN by Resolution 77/276, at the initiative of small island states like Vanuatu. This issue of climate change has not received the greatest global political attention in the recent period – inter alia as a result of the pro-fossil views of the American Trump administration. These views can be summarized by the words “drill, baby, drill “. The need to drive out fossil fuels was simply no longer keenly felt, whereas this had been a major yardstick for a necessary climate policy before.
The ICJ gave a lengthy and unanimous advice on 23 July, of some 130 pages. In my own words the summary is that all States, large or small, have an international legal obligation to prevent significant harm to the environment and to avoid contributing to the degradation of our climate by excessive emissions of greenhouse gases. Conduct of States which act within the scope well known conventions like the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement, has to conform to the terms of those conventions. In general, such conduct should be guided by Due Diligence, a principle which the Court had expressed in several previous cases relating to environmental protection (like the pulp mills in Uruguay) . The ICJ gave a rather precise indication of what Due Diligence actually means, both in a material sense (such as sticking to scientific advice, adhering to the best available standards) , as in the procedures to be followed.
The Court emphasized further that States have a duty to cooperate, which is easier said than done in a time of world wide conflicts and sanctions. Also, any breach by a state or states of an existing obligation gives rise to a wrongful act on the part of the state responsible, and that may lead to claims by those States that have to live with the negative consequences. No wonder that the small island states were very happy with this important advice. An Advisory Opinion by the ICJ is strictly speaking not a binding ruling but it carries a lot of weight as the considered and in this case even unanimous view of the principal judicial organ of the UN .
So from NATO to climate change, it only shows the outsize magnitude of the tasks for governments of the world in the near and more distant future. Defence is now in a state of alert, and rightly so, but the time will come that other issues will take it to the front pages.
