Chinks In The Climate Law Armor: State Responsibility For Climate Change Harms
- IJLLR Journal
- 5 days ago
- 1 min read
Girish Bhaskaran Nair, LL.M., Government Law College, Trivandrum
ABSTRACT
Attribution has long been a necessary limb of State responsibility under Article 2 of ARSIWA and the customary law. Climate litigants struggle to prove attribution to fix State responsibility in international adjudication, given diffuse, multi-state causation. Further, the climate law regime gives individuals no litigation route of their own. The trend is for the claimants to invoke general human rights instruments, which impose a duty of care rather than requiring attribution. Drawing on landmark climate cases, this article traces the trajectory and argues that the practice carries a cost beyond doctrine: it excludes large-scale, geographically dispersed climate victims from any effective remedy, and it rests on international bodies speaking with judicial authority they do not hold, over matters a State's own courts have settled, raising real questions of sovereignty. Several major States have not unreasonably limited their exposure to these mechanisms, a pattern this article argues risks weakening the human rights treaty regime itself if left unaddressed. The article argues that the remedy for such diffuse harm should be international in character rather than borne by one State's citizens, and that the durable solution lies in equipping climate law with enforcement mechanisms of its own.
