Last week, the High Court of New Zealand delivered a blow to a largely ignored asylum seeker problem that has been quietly bleeding and threatening to hemorrhage into a full-scale global catastrophe within two or three decades.
A 37-year-old man from the tiny, obscure nation of Kiribati, Ioane Teitiota, stood to make history as the world’s first climate refugee. He argued that global warming is a form of persecution and that those displaced by its effects should be recognized under the UN’s Refugee Convention.
However, in his judgment, Justice John Priestley said it was not the High Court’s place to alter the scope of the Refugee Convention by granting Mr Teitiota’s leave for appeal. The judge said the enormity and scale of the problem was a fundamental reason for his decision:
“On a broad level, were they to succeed and be adopted in other jurisdictions, at a stroke, millions of people who are facing medium-term economic deprivation, or the immediate consequences of natural disasters or warfare, or indeed presumptive hardships caused by climate change, would be entitled to protection under the Refugee Convention.”
Although he has lived in New Zealand since 2007, the government has refused Mr Teitiota and his family asylum based on the current convention which was drawn up more than 50 years ago, before rising seas started threatening the 33 low-lying equatorial islands and atolls that make up the tiny nation, just under 4,000 kilometres north-east of Brisbane.
The situation is now so dire there is no room left to bury the dead on some of the islands, let alone provide a home for the living. They are being encouraged to leave by their President, Anote Tong, who described his policy of orderly evacuation at the UN General Assembly in September as “migration with dignity”.
Fresh water - a basic human right - is the main problem. Bloomberg Business Week reported last week that fresh water supplies would run out before the rising seas fully submerge Kiribati.
Although aid agencies around the world have been warning governments for years about the coming tsunami of “climate refugees”, the world is unprepared for Mr Teitiota and his kind.
According to Steve Trent, chief executive of the London-based Environment Justice Foundation (EJF), governments are in denial about the effects of rising seas despite sobering statistics. The EJF, an international non-profit environment and human rights organisation, has been lobbying governments and politicians for a new agreement on environmental refugees.
The EJF said that climate refugees already outnumber those people fleeing persecution by three-to-one and predicts that the number of climate refugees could climb to 150 million by 2050.