This firebrand Indigenous attorney is in the world’s highest court fighting for climate justice

This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

Julian Aguon wore a dark blue suit and garland made of white coconut fronds, brown hibiscus tree bark, and brown cowry shells. Under the arched ceilings and chandeliers of the Peace Palace in The Hague, he stepped to the podium to make his case to the International Court of Justice. 

“The right to self-determination is a cornerstone of the international legal order,” Aguon told the 15 judges who make up the court. “Yet climate change, and the conduct responsible for it, has already infringed the right to self-determination for the many peoples of Melanesia.” 

The International Court of Justice, or ICJ, normally hears disputes over lands and waters between countries, but sometimes it takes on cases of broader global resonance. This was one of them: Aguon was arguing on behalf of Pacific island nations thousands of miles away that hope to hold accountable the countries most responsible for climate change. The 42-year-old attorney from Guam spent five years working toward this moment, along with his co-counsel, Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh. Now, he sought to underscore what was at stake. 

“The peoples of Melanesia live exceptionally close to the Earth, and thus feel the vandalism visited upon it acutely,” he said. “Moreover, theirs represents living, breathing, alternative imaginations — imaginations other than the one that has brought this planet to the brink of ecological collapse. Thus, ensuring they are able to live and thrive in their ancestral spaces is of the utmost importance, and not only for themselves, but for all of humanity.”

Aguon grew up on Guam, the son of a plumber and a social worker. His childhood consisted of playing in jungles with his cousins, where elders warned them to avoid anything metal in case it was leftover ordnance from World War II; family gatherings to pray the rosary in the Chamorro language; and absorbing a cultural devotion to serving one’s community. His dad worked short stints for various employers, including at a naval ship repair facility, and died of pancreatic cancer when Aguon was 9. Aguon has wondered if his death was related to U.S. military pollution.

At the time, his father’s death led his family to disintegrate, and Aguon buried himself in books like The House on Mango Street, the story of a Chicana girl growing up in Chicago — a coping mechanism that deepened his empathy and drive for justice. A quote from James Baldwin resonates with Aguon today: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

“Grief so often has an isolating effect that it need not have,” Aguon told Grist. “I feel like my grief has been a bridge that I’ve walked across to get to other people.”

In the 1990s, when Aguon was a kid, a massive typhoon hit Guam. The windows and sliding glass door in his home shattered, and Aguon, his brother, sister, and mother propped a mattress up in their living room and hid behind it. Aguon remembers tracing the mattress’ embroidered flowers with his finger as the family waited for the winds to pass. Years later, he would read a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that predicted the coming of even stronger cyclones.

“At that moment I was like, ‘Wow, we’ve already been through so much,’” he said. How much more extreme would the storms get? How much more would his community have to endure? “I had a really shocking sense of the scale.”

The case before the ICJ, led by Aguon’s law firm, Blue Ocean Law, hopes to establish legal consequences for nations that have driven climate change and illuminate what obligations those countries owe to people harmed. 

The court is being asked to provide an advisory opinion to clarify the legal obligations of countries under existing international law. Aguon describes it as a request for an objective yardstick by which to measure those countries’ actions, which could open the door to a new era of climate reparations.

After Aguon and Wewerinke-Singh exited the courtroom last week, they joined a press conference before the palaceʻs marble staircase near its front entrance. Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s top climate official, told reporters that the island nation deliberately chose Blue Ocean Law to represent it at the ICJ because the Indigenous-led firm would not only represent them legally, but culturally. 

“This is a case about our identity as Pacific Islanders, our human rights as citizens of this planet, and the responsibilities that states have to ensure our human rights and our cultural identity and our essence and our future is protected,” Regenvanu said.

If the ICJ delivers the advisory opinion Vanuatu is seeking, Aguon hopes Indigenous peoples will be able to leverage that opinion in climate-related lawsuits against their governments and file human rights complaints against both countries and corporations. Given the climate impacts Indigenous peoples are already experiencing, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

In the summer of 2010, then-28-year-old Aguon was just a year out of law school and was looking for a job after finishing up a clerkship with Guam’s Supreme Court. He wanted to work in international and human rights law, but no firms specialized in that on Guam, the largest island in the Pacific region of Micronesia that’s home to about 160,000 people. Well-established lawyers on the island discouraged him from trying to start a new firm from scratch: Why not work for a few years, get some more experience, they suggested. 

“They were right, in some ways,” Aguon said. “I did lack experience, but I didn’t necessarily need the experience that they had, because I wanted to do something different.” 

What he envisioned was a law firm that could advocate on behalf of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific: communities like the Marshallese, who are still fighting for justice after decades of U.S. nuclear testing; like the people of Tuvalu, where rising seas are threatening to eliminate entire islands; and the Chamorros, like Aguon, where an ever-expanding American military presence increasingly stresses the island’s lands and waters.

To accomplish that, Aguon would need to be licensed to practice law in multiple countries. He spent months studying for and passing bar exams not only on Guam, but also in the Marshall Islands and Palau. He opened a solo law practice in 2010 in a tiny office in the village of Hagåtña, Guam’s capital. At first he worked locally, providing legal counsel to Guam’s legislature and defending the island government’s plans for an Indigenous-only vote on the island’s political status. As his workload grew and his clientele expanded, he opened up Blue Ocean Law in 2014, and began to hire staff attorneys who saw the law the way he did: as a tool for social change that is both severely limited and potentially emancipatory. 

“We are a small team of activist lawyers, social change lawyers,” Aguon said. His colleagues include his ICJ co-lead Wewerinke-Singh, who has worked on climate litigation across multiple regions and U.N. courts; Alofipo So’o alo Fleur Ramsay, a Samoan attorney whose environmental justice work in Australia and in the Pacific has earned her chiefly orator titles from two villages in Samoa; and Watna Mori, a Melanesian lawyer from Papua New Guinea whose expertise in human rights and environmental law extends to advocacy for legal systems that value Indigenous knowledge systems.

Blue Ocean Law now includes seven attorneys, whose work spans Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, the three major regions of the Pacific. 

Over the next decade, Aguon argued for Guam’s right to self-determination before a U.S. federal appeals court in Honolulu, defending the island’s effort to limit a vote on Guam’s political status to Indigenous Chamorros. (Chamorro is also spelled CHamoru, but Aguon prefers the former). He lost, and Guam has yet to schedule a vote.

But Aguon is still proud of one aspect of the judges’ decision, which recognizes a legal distinction between racial and ancestry classifications. “From now on, for all Indigenous peoples living under U.S. rule, there is now a case that formally and comprehensively disentangles those two concepts, which means that Native peoples throughout the country can cite it to argue that some ancestral classifications are not the same as racial classifications,” he said.

After losing in federal court, Aguon and his team took their advocacy on behalf of the people of Guam to the United Nations. The island is still formally recognized by the U.N. as a colony, and first became an American military outpost at the turn of the 20th century. For decades, the U.S. refused to grant Chamorros U.S. citizenship, and instead forced them to live under a carousel of capricious naval governors who banned everything from the Chamorro language to interracial marriage to whistling. 

“Law is the vocabulary of the powerful in so many instances,” Aguon said. “The U.S. military was probably my greatest teacher in that regard.”

His firm has advised the Marshall Islands’ government on its legal options as it continues to contend with the legacy of U.S. nuclear tests. Aguon and his colleagues have also worked with organizations and legislatures in Pacific countries like Fiji to consult on the risks of deep-sea mining.

Aguon’s team has filed complaints about human rights violations by the U.S. military against the Chamorro people with the United Nations, prompting three U.N. rapporteurs to issue a joint letter in 2021 criticizing the U.S. for denying the Chamorro people their right to self-determination. 

Just last month, Blue Ocean Law filed a complaint with the U.N. Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples on behalf of youth from Palau who say U.S. militarization in their islands is violating their rights, including their right to freely consent to what happens on their land. 

“We’re consistently taking on the U.S. empire in all of these cases,” Aguon said.

In 2006, the same year that Aguon went to law school, the U.S. military proposed a massive expansion of its presence on Guam, deciding to move its Marine Corps base to Guam from Okinawa after local opposition to the soldiers’ presence became impossible to ignore. (At the heart of the anti-military protests were concerns about American soldiers’ sexual violence against Okinawan women and girls, including the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old by two Marines and a Navy sailor.)

Between the 8,000 service members, their 9,000 dependents, and the tens of thousands of construction workers and other staff needed to create more facilities for the new base, the military estimated there would be an influx of 80,000 people on Guam, increasing its population at the time by more than half. “It’s good for the strategic interests of America,” retired Marine Corps Major General David Bice told the Guam Chamber of Commerce in 2007. “It’s good for our friends in the Pacific, and it’s also good for Guam.” 

The community balked. Aguon felt that the military used language to obfuscate rather than illuminate the reality of its impact on Guam. For example, “live-fire training” was a euphemism that could refer to anything from machine gun firing to large-scale bombing practice. “Environmental impact” encompassed the destruction of cultural sites dating back more than 1,000 years. “Readiness” referred to the military’s ability to respond to threats, but it wasn’t always clear whether the Indigenous people were among those the U.S. cared about protecting.

“The law is about hyper-vigilance, hyper-attentiveness to how language is being used and deployed,” Aguon said. “Often it is being weaponized against people most in need of this protection.” 

Litigation and community protests forced the Department of Defense to shrink its military relocation to 5,000 troops and change the location of its planned firing range. The new Marine Corps base opened last year, and a machine-gun practice range is being built adjacent to a federal wildlife refuge.

Aguon sees the law as a single tool among many to push back against this entrenched militarism that he sees echoed around the world, from Honolulu to Gaza. To him, what will ultimately effect change is solidarity. 

“We’re up against such huge, gigantic, colossal forces,” Aguon said. “I’m casting my net of hope in that direction, that the peoples of the world — from the ground up — can really find more effective ways to confront these forces that we’re up against.”

In 2017, Aguon sat in Straub Hospital in Honolulu and held the hand of a longtime mentor, Marshallese leader Tony de Brum, who is known internationally for his global leadership in fighting climate change. De Brum had served as a father figure after Aguon’s dad passed and helped inspire his passion for climate justice. “Give them hell,” de Brum said, before he too died. Four years later, Aguon was named a Pulitzer finalist for a screed on climate change in the Pacific: “To Hell With Drowning.”

When Vanuatu asked for his law firm’s help with its climate change case five years ago, Aguon hadn’t ever argued before the ICJ and wasn’t intimately familiar with the particularities of its proceedings. 

The ICJ only accepts cases brought by U.N. member states, and because the U.S. never relinquished Guam, the island territory doesn’t have the right to file cases there. The same is true for countless Indigenous nations throughout the world whose borders are missing from most maps: The highest court in the United Nations doesn’t have a seat for them, and so their voices are rarely heard. That echoes other venues of the U.N., where Indigenous peoples are often left out of key negotiating rooms because their nations don’t have U.N. member state status and they lack representation within their colonial governments.

“The ICJ proceedings are more state- and international-organizations-focused, less people-centered, where engagement by civil society is quite restricted, and Indigenous peoples do not have a direct pathway for engagement in the court,” said Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law who has also assisted on the climate case. That’s in contrast to other U.N. legal venues like the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, she said. “So there is no easy pathway for Indigenous peoples’ engagement, and especially in this case, that would be important given their tremendous knowledge and expertise in climate change and biodiversity.” 

Sometimes, nongovernmental organizations may intercede, as in this ICJ case where a dozen were approved to participate. In addition to representing Vanuatu, Aguonʻs team is also representing the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a nongovernmental organization that consists of Melanesian Pacific island states. The organization also includes the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front, which represents the Indigenous Kanak people of New Caledonia who are fighting for independence from France.

Bringing a case before the ICJ requires specific knowledge and meaningful funding, and often parties are represented by a cottage industry of attorneys who specialize in the ICJ and are familiar with its proceedings. This is only the second time that a Pacific state has sought an advisory opinion from the ICJ. The last time was in 1996, when the Marshall Islands asked the judges to weigh in on whether detonating or threatening to use nuclear weapons violated international law. The judges said that it may be legal in extreme cases of self-defense. 

“Many of these countries that have never argued before the ICJ before are actually not just coming to argue their case, but leading from the front,’” said Chowdury from the Center for International Environmental Law. “It is showing and demonstrating to the world that this is an avenue of justice.”

Just getting on the court docket is a challenge and, in this case, required getting a resolution approved by the U.N. General Assembly. The case was originally launched in 2019 by law students at the University of the South Pacific, who took a ground-up approach to persuading U.N. General Assembly members in the Pacific and beyond to formally request an ICJ advisory opinion. As their campaign grew, Aguon found himself and his staff providing input at all hours of the day every time a word or comma changed in the draft that circulated among U.N. delegates.

The case morphed into the largest ever in ICJ’s history. Overall, 97 countries and 12 nongovernmental organizations are urging the court to weigh in on what major polluting countries owe to the peoples and nations who have been harmed by their relentless carbon emissions. Aguon spoke on the first day, but oral arguments were scheduled for the first full two weeks of December. It’s not clear when an opinion will be rendered.

In the meantime, Aguon hopes that not only the court but the world will pay attention to the stories that the case is revealing about the cost of climate change to Pacific peoples. During the press conference near the entrance of the Peace Palace, he told the story of one of the villages he visited when collecting witness testimony for the case.

“There is a village at the mouth of a river in the Gulf province of Papua New Guinea, that is on the move again. The people of Vairibari, whose ancestors have lived along the banks of the Kikori River Delta since time immemorial, have already moved four times due to sea level rise. This will be their fifth and final relocation. Final, because there is simply no more inland to go,” Aguon said. 

“A planning committee has been formed to handle the logistics. Among other things, the villagers are debating about how best to relocate the remains of their deceased relatives, because storm surges have already begun washing away the dead. The people of Vairibari want nothing more than to stay. But climate change is making that option all but impossible.”