What the new climate advisory opinions mean for Indigenous Peoples — and who will use them

When the International Court of Justice delivered its advisory opinion on climate change on 23 July 2025,  a formal statement of what international law requires of States, authoritative though not binding in itself,  it did something courts rarely do. It acknowledged its own limits. A complete solution, it observed, "requires the contribution of all fields of human knowledge."

A year later, that sentence framed a discussion at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Each July the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — EMRIP, the body of independent experts that advises the UN Human Rights Council and assists States and Indigenous Peoples in implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — holds its annual session. Alongside the formal agenda, delegations and organisations convene side events: smaller, self-organised sessions, and often where the practical arguments actually get made. The Human Rights Practice Program co-sponsored two of them this year.

The first, UNDRIP at 20: Charting the Next Twenty Years of Indigenous Peoples' Human Rights, took place on 13 July. H.E. Francisco Calí Tzay, Permanent Representative of Guatemala, joined Dr. Binota Moy Dhamai of the Geneva Office of Indigenous Peoples, CERD member Saul Vicente Vasquez, Professor Megan Davis of UNSW Sydney, and Hellan Empaing of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, with Luisa Castaneda-Quintana, Executive Director of Land is Life, moderating. The panel considered how the Declaration has reshaped State practice and treaty body jurisprudence since its adoption, and what implementation should look like over the next two decades.

The second, From Advisory Opinions to Advocacy: Indigenous Peoples and International Climate Jurisprudence, followed on 14 July in Room VII, and returned to the question the Court had left open: what can Indigenous Peoples and their allies actually do with these opinions? H.E. Sylvain Kalsakau of the Permanent Mission of Vanuatu, Luisa Castaneda-Quintana of Land is Life, Joie Chowdhury of the Center for International Environmental Law, EMRIP member Gam Shimray, and Professor Elisa Marchi of the Human Rights Practice Program and the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona spoke, moderated by Ghazali Ohorella of the Alifuru Council.

Professor Marchi took the Court's admission as an invitation, and set out four answers to it.

The first is training the advocates who will use these opinions. A legal opinion, as Prof. Marchi put it, is only as strong as the people equipped to use it. The Human Rights Practice Program is built for precisely the people these opinions are meant to serve — advocates who cannot leave their community, their organisation or their job to study. It is delivered fully online and structured around practice rather than commentary, so that students produce the submissions, shadow reports and advocacy strategies the work actually calls for. It sits alongside the University of Arizona's Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program, which has trained Indigenous lawyers for more than thirty years and whose graduates now work across seven socio-cultural regions.

The second is access, and it came with an offer. The purpose of the program, Dr. Marchi argued, is to reach the people conventional graduate education does not: practitioners already carrying a caseload, community advocates who cannot relocate, and young people in the countries where these opinions will matter most. She pointed to the Youth Human Rights Forum, which she said had brought together nearly 300 young people from more than 25 countries this year — not only to train them, but to have young people produce knowledge about human rights themselves. On that basis she offered the panel two things: tailored virtual trainings for practitioners and communities on what these opinions say and how to use them, built around needs that partners bring; and a session on the advisory opinions at a future Youth Forum.

The third is translation. Two landmark opinions now exist — the ICJ's and the Inter-American Court's Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 — and neither implements itself. Hundreds of pages of judgment are not yet a tool a community can use. The Indigenous Rights and Protected Areas Initiative  at the University of Arizona, that Prof. Marchi direct,  runs an open resource centre and two databases holding roughly 170 human rights recommendations from more than thirty countries, so that an advocate can find the standard that fits their case in minutes.

The fourth is documentation: working with communities to document violations and bring their cases before UN human rights bodies, most recently through a parallel report to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on Guatemala. This is the work our students are trained to do, and the reason their portfolios hold real submissions rather than essays about them.

The timing matters. States are moving to meet the 30×30 target of protecting thirty percent of the planet's land and sea by 2030. That target can secure Indigenous territories or repeat old patterns of dispossession, and the difference turns on whether the standards these courts affirmed are applied in practice.

The Human Rights Practice Program is developing further initiatives to support the implementation and impact of the two advisory opinions, and will announce them over the coming months. To hear about them first — along with our online programs, events and openings — join our mailing list here.  

The Human Rights Practice Program at the University of Arizona offers a fully online BA and MA and four graduate certificates — Human Rights Practice, Human Rights and Documentary Media, Human Rights and Technology, and Gender-Based Violence — for people already working in the field and those about to enter it.

Read the opinions

International Court of Justice, Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, advisory opinion of 23 July 2025 — https://www.icj-cij.org/case/187/advisory-opinions

Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 on the climate emergency and human rights, adopted 29 May 2025 and made public on 3 July 2025 — https://www.corteidh.or.cr/tablas/OC-32-2025/index-eng.html. 

Start here if the judgments are new to you

Land is Life, What International Courts Are Saying About Climate Justice and Why It's a Big Step Forward for the Defense of Indigenous Peoples' Rights — a plain-language guide to what both courts held, what it means specifically for Indigenous Peoples, where the opinions fall short, and how they can be used in legislative advocacy, litigation and submissions to UN bodies. Available in English and Spanish at https://www.landislife.org/publications/

Center for International Environmental Law, Advisory Opinions on Climate Change: Pathways for Their Strategic Use by Indigenous Peoples — on turning the reasoning into advocacy, with self-determination and climate displacement identified as entry points for litigation. https://www.ciel.org/advisory-opinions-on-climate-change-pathways-for-t…

What the courts left open

Neither court addresses Indigenous Peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact. Neither explains how Indigenous knowledge systems should actually be weighted in environmental and impact assessments. And neither sets out what free, prior and informed consent looks like in climate finance and energy transition projects, where the obligation now clearly applies but the procedure does not yet exist. These are open questions, not settled ones.

If you are studying with us

This is the material your coursework is drawn from. The opinions above are the primary sources; the Land is Life brief is a model of how a complex judgment gets turned into something an advocate can act on; and the gaps the courts left open are live questions rather than settled ones. If you are looking for a capstone or a portfolio project, they are sitting right here.

From the program

Our open resource centre and databases, holding roughly 170 human rights recommendations from more than thirty countries — https://indigenous.arizona.edu/

Take part

We are developing further initiatives to support the implementation of these opinions, including tailored virtual sessions built around what partners bring us. To hear about them first, join our mailing list — https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfg_pNXgwcOxCfxj3xqocwdjjqmfOUPQhHpWBJFUVIteUPdjw/viewform

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