Human Rights Protection in the Climate Crisis 2.0: The UN Human Rights Committee’s Landmark Decision in Daniel Billy et al. v. Australia

Abstract

On September 23, 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee (Committee) published its groundbreaking decision in Daniel Billy et al. v. Australia, in which it found that Australia’s failure to adequately protect indigenous islanders from the Torres Strait region against adverse impacts of climate change amounted to a violation of their rights to enjoy their culture and to private life, family and home. In this contribution, I will outline the key findings of the decision and the underlying strands of the Committee’s arguments, to then analyze and critically reflect upon them against the background of currently discussed challenges faced by human rights dogma in the context of climate change. I will argue that the Committee took a hesitant and restraint position regarding victim status and the right to life with dignity, thereby also failing to account for harms located in the (further) future. Furthermore, the position is taken that the Committee’s questionable decision to exclusively focus on adaptation measures while remaining silent on obligations of mitigation was also owed to methodological hurdles internal to current human rights law. Despite these aforementioned shortcomings, it will be highlighted that the Committee still managed to overcome previously controversial admissibility hurdles bringing the case to the merits. Consequently, the Committee issued the first decision at the international level to tackle substantive human rights questions in the context of climate change that relate to the current situation of small islands and their indigenous inhabitants, thereby taking human rights protection in the climate change context to the next level.