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On December 2, 2024, Julian Aguon, a 2009 graduate of the William S. Richardson School of Law, argued before the International Court of Justice in a historic case on the obligations of states with respect to climate change. For the past five years, Aguon and Blue Ocean Law, the Guam-based human rights law firm he founded in 2014, have represented Vanuatu, beginning with the campaign to persuade the UN General Assembly to formally request an advisory opinion from the ICJ on the issue. In March 2023, the General Assembly resolution passed, resulting in the first ever advisory opinion request to be adopted by consensus.
Last fall, in the run-up to the momentous argument, Aguon was in residence at Richardson and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa as the Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals. During his residence, he visited classes, co-taught Pacific Island Legal Systems with Professor Susan Serrano, met with community leaders, and gave a public keynote address titled “On Earning Hope for the Future.”
Shortly before his ICJ argument, Aguon sat for an interview with Xiao Yi Zhao, a 3L at Richardson and a Program Associate for the Graduate & International Programs office. He discusses his work as an international lawyer, focusing on Indigenous peoples and the Pacific region, and shares advice for young lawyers and law students about how to use law effectively as a tool.
The interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Please tell us about your case pending before the International Court of Justice, or ICJ. What are you seeking in that case and how did you come to be involved?
My firm, Blue Ocean Law, has had the honor of serving as legal counsel to the Republic of Vanuatu since 2019, and over the course of those five years, we have helped Vanuatu in its efforts to secure an advisory opinion on climate change from the International Court of Justice. As the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, the ICJ could provide authoritative legal advice to all countries with respect to the scope of their obligations under international law, thereby unlocking the power of international law to help us respond effectively to the climate crisis.
We are most excited about the potential of this case to facilitate the pursuit of climate justice, for all frontline communities, but especially for small island developing states in the Pacific, the Caribbean, even Africa. Climate-vulnerable countries clearly have the most to gain from this advisory opinion.
In March 2023, we secured a historic resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly by consensus, which is the first time in the UN’s history that that has ever happened: a resolution requesting an advisory opinion from the ICJ that was adopted by consensus. So we’re going in strong. More importantly, the character of the question being asked of the ICJ is truly epic because it’s asking the Court to bring to bear the full corpus of international law to evaluate the legality of the target conduct, or anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
This is a massive effort, which is part of the reason why it’s taken so many years to shepherd through, but we’re excited about its potential, especially for climate-vulnerable communities. It’s been a real pleasure to work with Vanuatu, which has such a clear and emancipatory vision.
What would you say is the most challenging aspect of this case?
The most challenging aspect on the part of the government was the massive diplomatic effort that this entailed, which included meeting with, consulting with, and negotiating with the many countries of the world. On the part of the legal team, the hardest part was protecting the integrity of the legal question itself. Our client did everything to ensure a robust question, a question that would lead to a pronouncement on the legal consequences for those countries that have by their acts and omissions caused catastrophic harm in the form of climate change and its adverse effects.
In general, what do you think are some of the most pressing issues facing Indigenous people in the Pacific that require international legal attention?
Climate change is a huge issue for Indigenous people, as well as protecting biodiversity, especially for Indigenous communities across Oceania. We’re experiencing the adverse effects of climate change in real time, and they’re mammoth. For instance, for one of our briefs we submitted to the ICJ for another client, the Melanesian Spearhead Group, we gathered testimonies from communities throughout the region. My god, the sheer horror of real-time effects, the myriad ways in which climate change is already unraveling the very fabric of life, and the pace at which it is all happening.
For example, there’s a community in Tanna, Vanuatu, suffering enormously, and there’s a community that lives along the Kikori River in Papua New Guinea, the people of Veraibari village. Their stories are heartbreaking because they reveal the true scale of the loss, the true enormity of the loss that these communities are experiencing. There’s the loss of their root crops, their means of sustenance, and their cultural and spiritual connections to the land and to their ancestors. It’s all being imperiled by a destabilizing climate. So all of that is happening to the peoples of this part of the world.
Part of what we need to do is to show these international courts and tribunals just that: the true nature of the harm that climate change is exacting on our communities, and those harms include spiritual harms, not just material harms, like economic loss and damage, but also harms like acute mental and emotional distress. Many Pacific peoples feel they are being quickly untethered from the natural world that they understand and that they learned about through their cultural knowledge passed down to them by their ancestors since time immemorial. For these communities, this is such a deep injury, and we need all courts and tribunals to understand that in order to see how that should figure into any future awards of climate reparations.
How do you convince the other side to see the significance of the land, to see the connection that the Indigenous communities have to the land?
I think that’s a very good question. In some ways, that’s the million-dollar question. Is it a matter of ignorance, or a matter of volition? Is it really the case that these actors don’t see the harm, or is it that if they see the harm, they will have to change their behavior? Because that’s what we’re really getting at: we need fundamental shifts in the way we live our lives, the way we organize our societies and all of its various sectors. We need deep, radical, and rapid transformation of our society as a whole, and that demands having a very honest conversation about, well, just about everything. And so we see that some are feigning ignorance to evade accountability. It’s frustrating, but part of why the law is useful is because it’s one tool with which to force accountability. For example, that is the impetus behind “the polluter pays” principle.
Climate justice is about ensuring climate-vulnerable communities whose contribution to the crisis are the most negligible — meaning they have contributed so insignificantly that they had no hand in creating the current crisis, but they are bearing the brunt of it by paying the steepest price for a crisis they didn’t create themselves — really are able to have the resources necessary to adapt to climate change. That’s part of the reason why we need financial and technology transfers from the Global North to the Global South. That’s part of the argument, that those who have contributed the least are entitled to financial and technological support in order to adapt to the changed circumstances.
Do you think a collaborative effort between activists in Hawai‘i and other communities in the Pacific would be helpful for the cause?
Well of course, and I think there’s a lot of collaboration already across Indigenous communities in the U.S., for example, across Indigenous communities in the Pacific to include Hawai‘i. For example, there’s a lot of us who litigate climate justice cases that are in constant conversation with each other. The outcome of one case in one jurisdiction may well affect another case elsewhere. For example, I’m excited by the recent case here in Hawai‘i with the children plaintiffs who sued the state, the Department of Transportation, as well as the Montana case. And we are just in this national and international conversation together. It’s a fundamental idea that our children and our children’s children have the right to inherit the earth.
What guidance can you give for navigating the complexities of advocating for Indigenous rights within the current legal system?
The threshold issue for young lawyers to understand, even law students, is to really gain a solid foundation in the various legal fictions that have arisen over the course of this country’s history, whenever the U.S. government was attempting to reach for the vocabulary of the Constitution to provide cover for what was ultimately a political project, i.e., imperialism. Legal fictions abound in American law. For example, federal Indian law is rife with legal fictions, the most obvious being the legal fiction of the domestic dependent nation. And then the U.S. colonies or territories of the world have been governed under a separate legal fiction, and that is the fiction of the territorial incorporation doctrine.
As young lawyers in particular, you have to become masterful in U.S. constitutional law and all these various legal fictions that have appeared on the historical record over time to justify the subordination of Indigenous peoples in this country. Understanding the origins of that and then tracing its evolution meticulously is part of an activist lawyer’s toolkit, but also part of the skills that I and many of the professors here are trying to impart to the students so that they have an understanding of all that, and then they can use that knowledge to maneuver with the most sophistication within the parameters of prevailing law, in hopes of transforming the law.
What about international law? Do you think advocating for Indigenous rights is easier within international legal frameworks?
Well, it’s different. I’m an international law scholar and an international lawyer, and I have participated in various matters before the international legal community, and there are just so many other tribunals that you would go to. For example, we recently on behalf of the Indigenous Chamorro people of Guam, especially those Chamorros that have expressed their vehement objection to the U.S. militarization of the island of Guam, filed a petition to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The other day, before the White House, there was a multitude of nonprofit groups across the U.S. tasked with Indigenous rights that are trying to talk to the current administration about its failures with respect to various Indigenous groups living under U.S. rule.
My firm also filed a shadow report with the Center for Constitutional Rights to the treaty body tasked with monitoring the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. But of course the issues are challenging, and yet there’s a unique set of advantages and disadvantages, which I think is important for young lawyers to understand. The law is not a miracle. There are so many things the law just does not give you, that it does not tell you, and so many things international law does not cover, or covers inadequately, so it’s just one tool in the toolkit. That’s all it is, so it’s not to be worshipped or adored; it’s to be used skillfully, in full view of its limitations. The law is not everything. It’s just a tool, a profession, and it’s only useful depending on if you’re skilled at using it or not. It’s like using a spatula to make an omelet; you wouldn’t use a fork. As an activist, I care primarily about collective liberation. The law has a role to play in that, but it’s not nearly enough to bring about what I actually want. But overall, learning how the law changes over time and tracking its evolution over time will help you understand it.
And I just want to emphasize that with the ICJ case, it’s a special thing that the case was built and argued by an Indigenous-led law firm. That’s just not common, an Indigenous-led human rights law firm leading an international law case, so statistically rare. It’s usually the big firms of the Global North, the London and New York firms that do this work. The whole initiative, in fact, was conceptualized then carried out by Pacific Islanders—from the government of Vanuatu to the youth who formed the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change. That all three actors hail from the Pacific—the legal team, the government, and civil society—is something special indeed. We’ve joined together, united by our belief that international law, while itself limited, can nevertheless be called upon to help humanity deal with the climate crisis.
You recently published the book No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies.How has your work as a human rights lawyer influenced your writing? What is your writing process like more generally?
Well, that book is so different because I started writing it during the pandemic, and I wrote it mostly for myself, mostly because I couldn’t not write it. I didn’t think the book would have a big life, but long story short, a wonderful Cheyenne and Arapaho author named Tommy Orange, a friend of a friend, he read it, loved it, reached out to me, and referred me to his agency, the Aragi agency in New York. And then sort of overnight, I got an agent and a book deal. Then I wrote an essay in The Atlantic, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer. And that all kinda happened in rapid succession. But I think it’s timing, it’s the universe, it’s luck, it’s all those things. It’s kind of hard to describe my process because I don’t really have one. It’s just whenever I have enough time away from the law. So for example, for my Atlantic essay, I gave myself six weeks to write it while my team stepped up and helped to cover me during that time. I can’t always multitask. I have to set the time aside.
Thank you so much for meeting with me and making time for this interview. Just one last question: how do you think your time here at Richardson prepared you for the work you do?
I think Richardson — and Ka Huli Ao in particular — gave me what I needed to succeed in my career as a human rights lawyer. I learned lessons here that I’ve used every day since — that we are here to be helpful, that a life in the law could be one of service.