COP31 is underway in Turkey. No need for any expectations here. It’s guaranteed to be a failure. Even the staunchest defenders of this UN-based, consensus-driven international process are beginning to despair about its inherent dysfunctionality – and it’s all-too-obvious subservience to the corrupting power of fossil fuels.
So let’s just imagine a world without the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Without an annual COP fiasco.
Wouldn’t it be extraordinary if a tiny NGO based in the Pacific islands were to be judged by our successors to have contributed as much to avoiding climate breakdown as the entire weight of the UN’s Framework Convention process over the last 36 years.
That NGO is the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change.
Before I seek to justify such an obviously insane view, I should acknowledge that my brain may still be frazzled by the outcome of the US Midterms. I’m still celebrating. I only mention this because my biggest take-away from Tuesday last week was the glorious triumph of the Rule of Law over the Rule of the Corrupt.
And that’s relevant for this post, in that I believe the entire UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process is now irredeemably corrupted. As in beyond redemption. Which posits the question: where might we look for the climate equivalent of the ‘triumph of the Rule of Law’ in the Midterms?
Which takes me straight back to those Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change.
In March 2019, 27 students from 8 Pacific islands (led by Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands) set out to persuade the Pacific Islands Forum to take the issue of climate change and human rights to the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ). Vanuatu picked up the baton, building a coalition of Small Island Developing States to petition the UN General Assembly to ask the ICJ for an advisory opinion on ‘States’ climate change legal obligations’. Which it duly did in 2023, with more than 100 countries supporting.
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice delivered a unanimous advisory opinion declaring that climate change is an existential threat, that all States have legally binding obligations under international law to protect the climate system, and that any State’s failure to protect the climate system (including ‘through fossil fuel production, consumption, exploration licences or subsidies’) may be (an internationally wrongful act).
In May 2026, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed that ruling.
This is the single most important determination under international law on the obligations of nation states regarding the climate crisis. To be sure, it’s an advisory determination, which sceptics have of course seized on to dismiss its relevance.
What the hell do they think their cherished Paris Agreement is? Mandatory? I don’t think so. The last mandatory climate agreement we had was the Kyoto Protocol back in 1997, which was ultimately put to the sword by a totally corrupt nexus of fossil fuel-producing and fossil fuel-consuming countries.
Every single one of the 90,00O or so delegates gathering in Antalya understands these power dynamics. If the UNFCCC’s Secretariat had the balls, it would start every god-forsaken COP with a completely anonymous poll posing the following three questions:
- What percentage of attending delegates believe the 2015 Paris Agreement is effectively ‘dead’, as in incapable of delivering an outcome that will prevent runaway climate change?
- What percentage of attending delegates believe the UNFCCC is still ‘fit for purpose’, as in more than just ‘the only show in town’?
- What percentage of attending delegates believe we now need some ‘new process’ to get us out of this inexorable descent into total climate breakdown?
My bet, for what that’s worth, would be a 50% response for Question 1 (there are still far too many who’ve been drinking the Paris kool-aid for more than a decade); 40% for Question 2 (still far too many on the utterly corrupt corporate gravy train); and 90% for Question 3 (most COP junkies are actually pretty smart).
What do you reckon?
So what might that ‘new process’ be? I’m still vaguely hoping that the break-away ‘coalition of the willing’ (made up of 57 countries at the moment) that came into being after the utter failure of COP30 in Brazil, under the title ‘Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels’, might still be capable of blazing a trail here. Its inaugural conference in Santa Marta in April this year was very positive. And there will be a second conference in Tuvalu in July 2027, with proceedings hosted by Vanuatu and Ireland.
But I’m sort of beginning to lose faith in this. Primarily because whatever this coalition of the willing comes up with will still have no binding legal force, and will still have to be referred back to the UNFCCC’s utterly corrupted COP process. So more or less useless.
Which takes me back to the International Court of Justice. This itself is of course part of the UN, as well as the corrupt as well as the corrupt UNFCCC, but the ICJ answers to the UN General Assembly, and is not subject to what is, effectively, a ‘for-ever-veto power’ for the UN’s petrostates.
Which means we can start thinking about a ‘coalition of the law-abiding’, rather than a coalition of the willing.
And the starting point for this would be the ICJ’s July 2025 ruling.
One possible starting point in law might be the crime of Gross Criminal Negligence, most usually applied in the UK in cases of manslaughter: ‘where the death is a result of a grossly negligent (though otherwise lawful) act or omission on the part of the defendant’.
Just to take it one step further, guilt can only be proven if two things exist: the ‘actus reus’ (the guilty act itself), and ‘mens rea’, where the accused had foresight of the consequences of the action (or lack of action) but was nonetheless willing to allow those consequences to happen.
Which is exactly what our politicians are guilty of today – all 95 Heads of State scheduled to drop in at COP31. When our Prime Minister Andy Burnham speaks today, a plethora of ‘actus reus’ will be on display (with approval for the Jackdaw gas field just the latest in a long list), and even a first-year law student could prove the ‘mens rea’ bit of it. He and his 94 fellow Heads of State all know the consequence of their failure to address the climate crisis proportionately, and are therefore all guilty of Gross Criminal Negligence.
It will never root out the contradictions at the heart of its corrupt proceedings.
God knows it won’t be any easier going down this governance route than that provided by the UNFCCC. But why do we still persevere, year after year, with an organisation that we know is structurally incapable of rooting out the contradictions at the heart of its corrupt proceedings?
So perhaps it’s time for a few of those well-meaning, long-suffering NGOs doing their time in Antalya (because what else is there to do?) to get together to design a totally independent governance structure for addressing the climate crisis – with States obliged to adopt mandatory rather than voluntary Nationally Determined Contributions; with compliance monitored by the ICJ; with an Oversight Council made up of NGOs like the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change etc etc.
A coalition of the law-abiding. Upholding the Rule of Law. Rather than being defiled and diminished, year after year, by the Rule of the Corrupt.
