COP28: A Canadian lawyer’s backchannel strategy to force polluters to act

A Canadian human rights lawyer is trying a different approach to compel the world's biggest polluters to compel nations to drastically lower their emissions.

With the United Nations’ climate conference, known as COP, underway in Dubai this week amid the usual delegate wrangling to phase out fossil fuels, one Canadian human rights lawyer at the annual event is promoting a different approach to compel nations to lower their emissions.

Payam Akhavan made a name for himself prosecuting the perpetrators of genocides in countries such as Rwanda and Bosnia. He’s now turning his attention to the climate crisis, which he says “brings a radically new chapter to our struggle for survival.”

Akhavan is a professor of international law and senior fellow at Massey College in Toronto. He is also a special adviser to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and has represented parties before the International Court of Justice and is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, an international agency that settles disputes between nations.

He is at the UN climate change conference in Dubai, COP28, acting as counsel to the Commission of Small Island states on climate change and international law – in essence, representing three of the world’s smallest countries at the world’s premiere climate summit.

For years, some of the world’s smallest countries – mostly islands in the South Pacific and Caribbean – have begged the international community to take action on climate change.

That’s because rising sea levels put their very existence at risk, they say.

Two years ago, the foreign minister of one of those nations, Tuvalu, stood knee-deep in the ocean and implored attendees at that year’s climate conference, in Glasgow, to make a significant and lasting move to cut emissions. Instead, all delegates managed to get was an 11th-hour, watered-down pledge to reduce coal consumption to produce energy.

Now, with global average temperatures getting closer to 1.5 C of warming over preindustrial norms (1.5 C is the seemingly incremental yet hugely consequential point at which most climate experts agree there’s no turning back), the pressure is on for something beyond the usual voluntary commitments.