What began with twenty-seven students in Port Vila has become the question of the whole world. On the 29th of March 2023 the General Assembly of the United Nations, led by Vanuatu and supported by more than a hundred and thirty nations as co-sponsors, adopted by consensus a resolution asking the International Court of Justice for its advisory opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change.
No nation called for a vote. In a time when the world agrees on so little, every nation let the question go forward together: what do we owe, under law, to the climate system, to the small island peoples and others most harmed by its breaking, and to the generations still to come?
The Waitaha grandmothers speak of the mokopuna, the grandchildren, as the ones for whom every decision is made, and the Haudenosaunee speak of the seventh generation. Here, in the language of the modern world, the nations are beginning to ask the same thing, not what is useful to us now, but what is owed to those who are not yet born.
Hold the Court in your prayers as it listens, and hold the young ones who started all of this in your heart.
United Nations General Assembly resolution 77/276, 29 March 2023. Read From the Islands to the World Court.