Climate Justice and Insurgent Lawyering in the ICJ and Beyond
Wednesday 2 April 2025
This seminar was presented by Alofipo So’oalo Fleur Ramsay and Professor Stewart Motha and chaired by Professor Margaret Young.
Climate destruction and dispossession is having its greatest impact on small island communities and nations. In December 2024 the ICJ held oral hearings in its Advisory Opinion on Climate Change. Drawing on experiences in Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Vanuatu and beyond – this seminar examined the strategies and techniques of insurgent lawyering deployed in the ICJ process and in other courts and tribunals. While the dominant emitters of GHGs have sought to narrow the ambit of applicable international law to the United Nations Framework Agreement on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement – island states have pushed for the application of the full corpus of international law. The nature of loss, damage, and harm; the historical and future obligations of states, and the status of indigenous cosmologies are what is at stake in climate litigation. What legal strategies redeem marginalised peoples and their knowledges?
Photo by Stewart Motha, Home destroyed by rising water in Veraibari Village, Papua New Guinea.
About the speakers
Alofipo So’oalo Fleur Ramsay is an international indigenous and human rights lawyer at Blue Ocean Law, Guam, with extensive experience as an environmental and climate justice lawyer in Australia and across Oceania. Blue Ocean Law represented Vanuatu and the Melanesian Spearhead Group before the ICJ in the Advisory Opinion on Climate Change; and Fleur also acted as co-counsel for Samoa. She was awarded the Winston Churchill Fellowship to travel and research innovative lawyering and best practice Indigenous environmental law practice. Fleur worked as a solicitor at one of the top law firms in Australia, and as a barrister at a prestigious chambers in Sydney, and as an associate to a judge at the Federal Court of Australia. She has been bestowed the chiefly orator titles of Alofipo from the Sale’aula village and So’oalo from Samauga village, both on the island of Savaii in Samoa. Fleur is a Visiting Professor of Practice at Birkbeck Law School, University of London.
Stewart Motha is Professor of Law, and co-director of the Centre for Law and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. His current research examines law's conceptualisation and administration of 'nature'. This includes a critical exploration of how 'nature' is imagined in climate litigation and national and international environmental law. Stewart has also published widely on issues of postcolonial justice; law, memory, and violence; and theories of sovereignty – research brought together in a monograph, Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence (University of Michigan Press, 2018). Stewart hosts a regular podcast, Countersign, where books, films, and other materials are discussed with their authors and creators. Multiple episodes of Countersign have dealt with ecological crises and human/animal relations.