Please share with us some information about your background and roles.
I’m the President and Founder of Blue Ocean Law, which is the law firm that represented Vanuatu in the ICJ climate change advisory opinion proceedings, from its inception in 2019 to its conclusion in 2025.
How was being recognised as Right Livelihood Award 2025 and how did it help with your activities and mission to boost urgent and long-term social change?
Apart from being an incredible honor, the award supported our work in a number of ways, including helping us to be able to return to the various Indigenous communities to deliver the news about the ICJ’s historic ruling and to ascertain their wishes with respect to next steps. It’s important to us that Indigenous peoples play a leading role in shaping the future of climate justice.
What is the current situation with after the ICJ intervention and how are you benefiting with all this visibility? How could we support your cause?
At the moment, many people around the world are putting their heads together and mapping out potential cases where the ICJ opinion can be used as leverage and support, especially where the Court has provided exceptional clarity. The visibility that the award has given us has helped us secure a spot in many of those conversations, affording us an opportunity to learn from, support, and be supported by others in the space.
What is your opinion on the importance of human rights education in the field of environmental rights and climate justice?
It is supremely important. Among other things, what the Court made crystal clear is that the climate crisis is also a human rights crisis. Several of the core human rights have of course already been violated as a result of man-made climate disruption. Thus, human rights education must form one of the central components of any contemporary climate justice curriculum.
What are the most important challenges ahead in the field of Human Rights and Democracy in the world? Could educational programmes like ours at the Global Campus of Human Rights contribute to create a safe space for discussions on reparations?
One of the biggest things working against us all is time. We have a mercilessly tight timeline in which to get our collective shit together. Thus we need to devise as many brilliant, innovative, and diverse strategies, legal and otherwise, to get us from where we are to where we need to be. That also means we must become better at thinking on our feet. We must cultivate a kind of intellectual athleticism, and not just because the window to avert all-out climate catastrophe is rapidly closing, but because so many other nefarious forces are also on the rise, including authoritarianism. Educational programs like yours could reach out to and remain in conversation with frontline communities in order to learn what types of support they most need now, especially as some of them are already actively considering one or more pathways to climate reparations.
Could you give a message to the students, professors, alumni, partners and staff of the Global Campus of Human Rights?
One thing that became abundantly clear to me over the course of working on this case is that the imagination that got us into this terrible planetary mess is not and cannot be the imagination to get us out of it. Thus part of our work as human rights lawyers is to use the law to protect those with a different imagination. Thus, protecting Indigenous peoples, that is, ensuring they are able to continue to live and thrive in their ancestral spaces, is a matter of the utmost importance. I would encourage educational programs like yours to find new ways to foreground Indigenous peoples, and their distinct worldviews and ways of knowing, in the teaching and practice of human rights.
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