The Unfinished Reckoning: Why True Climate Justice Demands a Confrontation with Colonialism

The concept of climate justice remains an empty promise without a full-throated reckoning with the legacy of colonialism. After the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) conspicuous silence on this foundational issue, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights now holds a historic opportunity to bridge the past and the present. It can, and must, formally link today’s escalating climate crisis to the enduring harms of empire.

This opportunity arrives at a pivotal moment. The African Union has declared 2025 the “Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations.” As it considers a request for an advisory opinion on states’ human rights obligations in the context of climate change, the African Court can transform this declaration from a slogan into a legal and moral imperative. By issuing a landmark opinion that affirms the causal link between colonial subjugation and contemporary climate vulnerability, the Court would mark a radical departure from the ICJ’s timidity and galvanize Africa’s fight for reparative justice.

A Legacy Carved in Thorns and Drought

The abstract connection between colonialism and climate vulnerability is made devastatingly concrete in the story of the Antandroy people of Madagascar. As detailed in an Amnesty International report from July 2025, the French colonial administration, between 1924 and 1929, deliberately unleashed genetically manipulated cochineal parasites. Their target: 40,000 hectares of vital, drought-resilient vegetation in the Androy region. This was not an ecological accident; it was a calculated act of ecological warfare, designed to destroy the subsistence economy of the Antandroy and force them into the colonial cash-crop labour system.

The consequences were catastrophic and intergenerational. The destroyed vegetation was not merely flora; it was a life-support system. It provided food and, crucially, helped preserve groundwater, acting as a natural bulwark against the region’s chronic droughts. Its annihilation erased this shield, leaving the land barren and the people exposed. A century later, the Antandroy face recurring mass hunger, displacement, and death with every drought—droughts that are now intensified and more frequent due to human-induced climate change. This climate crisis is driven disproportionately by the historical emissions of high-income nations, chief among them France—the very colonial power that engineered their vulnerability in the first place. The injustice is a perfect, poisonous feedback loop: the colonizer first dismantled the indigenous defenses, and now its industrial legacy supercharges the climate threats those defenses were meant to withstand.

When Science Leads and Politics Lags

The scientific consensus on this link is unequivocal. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2022 report explicitly stated that colonialism is not a relic of the past but an active driver of the climate crisis. It detailed how the historical and ongoing patterns of resource extraction, land dispossession, and imposed economic dependency have systematically rendered communities in former colonies more susceptible to climate impacts—from droughts and floods to cyclones and sea-level rise.

Yet, science alone cannot compel justice. It requires political will, particularly from states with the greatest historic responsibility, to act on mitigation, adaptation, and financing. When this political will is absent, the most vulnerable nations are forced to seek accountability through international law. This was the hope behind Vanuatu’s—a nation itself shaped by colonial rule under France and the UK—landslide victory at the UN General Assembly in March 2023, which led to the request for an ICJ advisory opinion. Many formerly colonised nations supported this effort, explicitly framing climate change as the latest chapter in a long history of colonial exploitation.

The ICJ’s subsequent opinion in July 2025 was therefore a profound disappointment. The word “colonialism” was conspicuously absent. Even more critically, the Court sidestepped the crucial question of temporal scope—how far back claims for climate obligations can reach. This evasion plays directly into the hands of former colonial powers, who often hide behind the defense that colonialism was “legal” in its time and that they were unaware of the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.

Customary International Law: A Crack in the Colonial Defense

Despite this silence, the ICJ’s opinion did offer a glimmer of hope. It affirmed that states’ climate obligations are rooted not only in treaties but also in customary international law. This is a pivotal recognition. Customary law dictates that a state’s responsibility is engaged if a wrongful act produces a continuing situation that violates international law in the present, regardless of when the act was initially committed.

This principle shatters the simplistic colonial defense. The question is no longer, “Were these actions illegal in 1925?” Instead, it becomes: “Are the human rights of the Antandroy people being violated today by the continuing situation of ecological devastation and heightened climate vulnerability created by those past actions?” The answer is an undeniable yes. The harms of colonialism are not frozen in history; they are living, active forces that shape present-day suffering.

The ICJ’s Half-Measure: A Door Opened, Then Slammed Shut

Having opened this door with one hand, the ICJ promptly closed it with the other. While endorsing customary law, the Court insisted that full reparation requires a “sufficiently direct and certain causal link” between the wrongful act and the injury. For the labyrinthine, multi-generational crimes of colonialism, this demand for a pristine, linear chain of causality is a legalistic poison pill.

It creates an impossible burden of proof. How can one definitively quantify, a century later, the exact percentage of the Antandroy’s suffering attributable to French colonial policy versus other factors? This standard provides a ready-made alibi for polluters and former colonizers. France can, and likely would, argue that the causal chain is too long and tangled, that too much time has passed, and that other intervening factors exist. As UN experts have astutely observed, “the greatest barrier to reparations for colonialism and slavery is that the principal beneficiaries of both lack the political will and moral courage to make them a reality.” The ICJ, by setting an impossibly high bar, provided them with a legal shield for their moral failure.

The African Court’s Defining Moment

Now, the spotlight turns to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Since May 2025, it has been reviewing a similar request for an advisory opinion. This is its moment to correct the ICJ’s failure and speak truth to power.

The African Court must do what the ICJ would not:

1. Explicitly Name Colonialism: It must articulate that the climate crisis is a direct consequence of an economic model built on colonial extraction and fossil-fueled industrialization.

2. Reframe Causality: It must recognize that the causal link between colonialism and climate vulnerability is systemic and evident, not a matter of isolated, direct lines. The vulnerability is the injury, and its colonial roots are plain to see.

3. Embrace a Progressive Interpretation: It should align its opinion with the African Commission’s 2022 Resolution on Africa’s Reparations Agenda, providing a legal framework for African states to pursue justice for historical crimes, including colonialism.

By seizing this opportunity, the African Court would do more than issue a legal opinion; it would lay the groundwork for a new jurisprudence of justice. It would give substance to the Year of Reparations, empower communities like the Antandroy, and challenge the international legal order to finally confront the ghost in the room. It may even create the momentum for a future return to the ICJ, compelling the world court to redeem its silence and finally align international law with the unequivocal truths of history and science. The choice is between echoing a comfortable silence or breaking it with a clarion call for justice. The African Court must find its voice.

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