The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights has been asked to clarify what human-rights obligations African States carry in responding to climate change, and the request has drawn an unusually heavy response: more than 107 amicus briefs and written observations have been filed in the advisory proceedings to date.

The scale of engagement reflects the stakes. Africa bears severe and disproportionate climate impacts despite its minimal contribution to historic global greenhouse gas emissions. Against that backdrop, a symposium held on 22 September examined the amicus submissions and the converging themes they place before the Court.

The submissions before the Court

Several briefs invite the Court to situate the climate crisis within Africa's history of colonial extraction and dispossession, and to recognise Indigenous Peoples not simply as vulnerable groups but as collective rights-holders and knowledge-holders.

Fernand Guevara Mekongo Mballa's submission links colonialism and Africa's incorporation into the global economy to the continent's climate vulnerability. He argues that the relationship between developed countries and the continent remains one of extractivism, with Africa still serving as a site for resource extraction and environmental disposability. On this account, extractivism is not merely a colonial legacy but an ongoing mechanism driving climate injustice.

The Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL) pushes the argument from history into legal responsibility. CIEL describes the climate crisis as part of a continuing colonial order in which historic extraction and structural inequality still determine who benefits and who bears environmental costs. It argues that reparations concern not only financial compensation but the systems that have left African communities disproportionately exposed, and urges African States to seek accountability from the States and companies responsible for historic and ongoing harm.

The Minority Rights Group argues that recognising Indigenous Peoples and minorities is a necessary condition for the effective enjoyment of rights already protected by the African Charter, not a political concession. Communities that remain legally or politically invisible struggle to assert collective rights to land, participate in climate decision-making, or challenge mitigation and adaptation measures that threaten their land.

A community-led submission, filed by seven communities and community-based organisations from six African countries, represents coastal and rural communities, Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders. It presents concrete climate realities: in Amadiba, changing rainfall has disrupted seasonal farming knowledge and destroyed staple crops; in Umgababa, flooding has destroyed livelihoods and opened graves, leaving families unable to identify where relatives are buried; in Buliisa, oil development has intensified environmental degradation while undermining the water sources, forests and livelihoods on which adaptation depends.

Carbon markets and Article 21

The Centre for Environmental Justice in Africa (CEJA) cautions that conservation areas, carbon markets and reforestation initiatives may themselves produce renewed dispossession where they disregard customary land rights or proceed without the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous Peoples.

Greenpeace Africa anchors this concern in Article 21 of the African Charter, which protects peoples' rights to their wealth and natural resources and guards against foreign exploitation. Drawing on SERAC v Nigeria, it recalls that Article 21 emerged from the continent's experience of colonial exploitation and cautions that the energy transition must not reproduce extractive relations through appropriation of land without consent and equitable benefit-sharing.

A joint submission by the Promise Institute, Climate Counsel, Sudan Human Rights Hub and SOMO develops the argument on carbon markets, contending that foreign actors may acquire African land and carbon sinks, extract their economic value for external markets, and leave affected communities with limited control or unequal benefits.

A legal pathway

The submissions converge on a proposition: climate action built on dispossession cannot be reconciled with the Charter's protection of collective rights. Although the Charter does not expressly mention climate change, its duty to respect, protect and fulfil rights — including the collective right to a satisfactory environment under Article 24 — requires States to prevent foreseeable environmental damage, regulate high-emission activities, pursue mitigation and adaptation, and protect affected communities.

A meaningful Advisory Opinion, the submissions suggest, would clarify that States' climate obligations are both substantive and procedural: substantively, reasonable measures to prevent foreseeable harm to life, health, food, property, culture, development and a satisfactory environment; procedurally, access to information, meaningful participation and effective remedies. Those duties would also extend to regulating private actors whose emissions, extractive activities or carbon-offset projects contribute to environmental harm.

The Court has not yet delivered its opinion. When it does, the submissions argue, it can frame climate inaction as a human-rights failure rather than a policy shortcoming — and articulate a distinctly African vision of climate justice in which African peoples determine their own climate future.