In May 2025, a coalition of African civil society organizations, including the African Climate Platform, Natural Justice, Resilient 40, the Environmental Lawyer Collective for Africa, and the Pan African Lawyers Union, has requested an advisory opinion from the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) on States’ obligations in relation to the climate crisis. The proceedings place core questions of prevention, human rights protection, and legal responsibility squarely before the Court. If successful, this would be the first ruling rooted in African regional norms to explicitly address state obligations, corporate accountability, and the right to reparations for climate harm. Such a decision would assert African agency in shaping global climate law and equip African states and movements with an instrument to demand justice on the world stage.
This process builds on a rapidly evolving body of international jurisprudence. Over the past year, advisory opinions from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the Inter American Court of Human Rights, and the International Court of Justice have clarified that:
- States have due diligence obligations to prevent climate harm
- These obligations extend to regulating private actors, including fossil fuel companies
- Breaches may trigger obligations of cessation and full reparation
Taken together, these opinions establish a baseline of legal principles on prevention, cooperation, and reparation. The African Court now faces a distinct task: translating and advancing these principles within the African human rights system, grounded in the continent’s legal frameworks, socio economic realities, and historical context.Reparations sit at the center of this process. Across amicus submissions and broader advocacy, there is convergence around a core proposition: obligations of African States cannot be reduced to domestic mitigation and adaptation alone. They must also include:
The proceedings also unfold against growing political traction around reparations for historical injustices and their ongoing legacies, including the UN General Assembly resolution recognizing slavery as the gravest crime against humanity and the African Union’s Decade on Reparations. These legal and political trajectories are beginning to align, but remain underdeveloped in practice. Additionally, the COP32 climate summit will be hosted in Africa under the Presidency of Ethiopia.
This webinar intervenes at that junction: immediately after the submission of amicus briefs and before the Court begins its deliberations. It provides a space to interrogate how reparations are being framed, contested, and advanced within the proceedings, and what is at stake for African legal and political strategies moving forward.