By Pat Black, SI Advocacy Advisor
On 23 July 2025, the International Court of Justice issued a unanimous advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change. In a significant follow-up step, on 20 May 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution A/80/L.65 by a recorded vote of 141 in favour to 8 against, with 28 abstentions, formally welcoming the opinion as “an authoritative contribution to the clarification of existing international law”. This means that countries are now legally accountable for climate harm under several overlapping sets of rules at once, not just under climate treaties. They are required to control polluting companies operating inside their borders, not only their own government activities. If they fail in these duties, the law treats it as a wrongful act with real legal consequences. Countries’ duties now include: the duty to stop the harmful conduct, to guarantee it will not happen again, and to pay compensation to those injured. And any country can hold another country to account for these breaches, even when the complaining country has not itself been directly damaged.
Linda Witong, SI Special Advisor has written a detailed briefing paper which sets out what the Court actually held, what the General Assembly has now formally endorsed, what the decisions mean for Soroptimist International’s advocacy across the Beijing Platform critical areas, other relevant treaties as well as the structural problems that limit what these instruments can be expected to achieve. The honest framing is that the opinion matters not because it will compel compliance today, but because it establishes what compliance looks like, and makes the cost of non-compliance progressively higher over time in courts, in markets, and in international legitimacy.
Implications for Soroptimist International Advocacy
The International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion and the UN Resolution offer multiple advocacy entry points across the Beijing Platform critical areas. The following are particularly important (check the detail in the briefing paper for each).
A. The Women’s Rights Pathway
The Opinion at paragraphs 376 through 384 expressly names women, children, and Indigenous Peoples as rights-holders whose recognised rights are climate-threatened. The legal structure is now in place: climate change affects women’s enjoyment of established human rights; States have obligations to respect and ensure those rights; participation of women in climate decision-making is part of those obligations; and any breach gives rise to State responsibility with the full range of consequences. The argument no longer needs to be made on climate-science grounds. It can be made on the human rights grounds the ICJ Court has now confirmed.
B. The Multilateral Leverage Point
Any State may invoke another State’s breach of these obligations regardless of direct injury. Combined with the Assembly’s request for a Secretary-General report on “ways to advance compliance,” the resolution establishes both a substantive standard and an institutional channel through which compliance can be monitored. For Soroptimist’s engagement with allied delegations — including work in New York, Geneva and Vienna in particular — this is the entry point. States that voted in favour have a legal interest in the compliance of all other States. That is a powerful framework for coalition-building which can be encouraged through national and international advocacy.
C. The Crime Prevention and Vienna Alliance Angle
The due diligence framework opens the possibility of advocacy at the intersection of climate change and crime prevention. Climate displacement is a documented driver of trafficking in persons and of gender-based violence. The Opinion’s due diligence framework requires States to regulate private actors, which can be argued to include those benefiting from climate displacement through exploitation. The Vienna Alliance Climate Working Group, of which the Alliance has had standing engagement, is well positioned to develop this argument.
D. Defending Existing Gender-Equality Mechanisms
General Assembly Resolution (A/80/L.65) and the ICJ Court’s opinion’s protection of language regarding the participation of women and girls comes at a moment when the UN system’s gender-equality mechanisms face significant pressures. The proposed UN Women / UNFPA merger and the Fifth Committee budget developments threaten the institutional structure through which gender-responsive climate advocacy is conducted. General Assembly Resolution (A/80/L.65) and the ICJ Court’s Opinion provides additional legal grounding for resisting those pressures. Where Member States have agreed by recorded vote that
participation of women in climate decision-making is a State obligation, defunding the mechanisms through which that participation is enabled becomes harder to justify.
Conclusion: Building the Record
The Opinion and the Resolution will not, by themselves, defossilise economies or provide reparations to those already suffering climate harm. However, they establish, with the imprimatur of both the Court and the General Assembly, that the conduct responsible for climate change is governed by binding obligations, that breaches carry legal consequences, and that the pathway from injury to remedy — however narrow, however contested — has now acquired a multilateral location from which it can be widened, but no longer denied.
They establish a legal baseline that cannot be negotiated away, even where outcome documents fail to cite it. And it does so over the objection of major emitters whose opposition itself confirms the significance of what the Court has done.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has worked in criminal justice. You do not always get the verdict the first time. But you build the record. And when the political winds change — as eventually they do — the record is what makes the next case possible. The Court has built the record. The General Assembly has endorsed it. The work of Soroptimist International and its civil society partners is to use it.
