Brainwashed Yale law student: "All nations should support a campaign to bring the rule of law to the climate change problem"

Tian Huang: Climate Victims Deserve a Hearing, Whether Here or in The Hague

At Yale, students are studying this campaign as part of a project on climate change and the international rule of law. Through this initiative, we have heard firsthand from island representatives who face the enormous challenge of working with powerful nations that seem not to care that their homelands, their ways of life, and their very existence are in peril. At bottom, the islanders' struggle is for climate justice and like earlier civil rights movements they may be forced to turn to the courts for help in prodding along recalcitrant political interests.

All nations should support a campaign to bring the rule of law to the climate change problem. Though any opinion obtained from the ICJ would be non-binding, it may begin a process whereby reducing the threat of climate change comes to be seen as a legal responsibility of nations, rather than an act of charity toward weak and distant neighbors. It may bring the order and principle to a matter affecting the very fate of our planet.

The sooner this transformation happens the better. Small low-lying island nations are the first and most obvious to experience significant impacts from climate change, but we delude ourselves when we think that they are alone or that the threat for us lies far in the future.

Tian Huang

Tian Huang is a student at Yale Law School. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation.