May 6, 2022 – Nearly seven years after initiating its landmark National Inquiry on Climate Change, the Philippines Commission on Human Rights (CHR) released its final report. The original petition, filed by Greenpeace Southeast Asia and individuals from across the Philippines, asked the Commission to examine the impacts of climate change on the human rights of the Filipino people and to consider the role of 47 major fossil fuel producing companies (the Carbon Majors companies) in driving the climate crisis, obstructing climate action, and contributing to resulting climate harms.
CIEL President Carroll Muffett issued the following reaction to the Commission’s final report:
The National Inquiry was systematic, careful, and comprehensive. Through fact-finding missions, community dialogues, expert reports and testimonies, and a dozen hearings conducted on three continents, the Commission gathered the largest, most comprehensive body of official, sworn eyewitness and expert testimonies, documentary evidence, and legal analysis publicly available anywhere in the world with respect to the climate responsibilities of Carbon Majors companies.
This report provides a roadmap to that evidence, not only for the people of the Philippines, but for lawyers, judges, human rights bodies, and affected people worldwide.
The conclusions it reaches with respect to the profound and pervasive human rights impacts of climate change are compelling, carefully documented, and as tragic as the testimonies of the survivors who informed them. They are also damning.
The Commission’s analysis demonstrates that, through their products and their operations, the Carbon Majors companies have contributed to the global climate crisis at a scale that is quantifiable and significant, both globally and historically.
The Commission has documented that the Carbon Majors companies, and the larger fossil fuel industry of which they are a part, were on notice of the climate risk of its products by no later than 1965.
Despite this notice, companies spent decades and untold millions of dollars sowing uncertainty about climate science and actively obstructing urgently needed climate action. It finds that the Carbon Majors, singly and in concert, engaged in “willful obstruction and obfuscation to prevent meaningful climate action.” And that these efforts were driven “not by ignorance, but by greed.”
But they are not, and cannot be, without consequences.
The Commission found that Carbon Majors companies have ongoing and undeniable responsibilities to respect human rights in their operations, to conduct due diligence to ensure their operations are not violating human rights, and to provide remedy when violations occur.
As the Commission said, these companies “need to know and be able to show” that they respect human rights in the climate context. When they fail to do so, they can be held accountable in the Philippines and likely beyond.
Accordingly, the Commission found that faced with the urgent need to transition the global economy, “acts to obfuscate climate science and delay, derail, or obstruct this transition may be the basis for liability, at the very least they are immoral.”
Indeed, the Commission concluded that this obfuscation arguably violates applicable standards of honesty and good faith under already existing Philippine law.
Just as significantly, the Commission extended this accountability and responsibility not only to the Carbon Majors themselves, but to the business enterprises that are part of their value chain. This includes the financial sector, whose investments in fossil fuels give them accountability similar to the Carbon Majors themselves.
The fossil fuel industry and its apologists may seek to dismiss the Commission’s inquiry and downplay the report by arguing that this was a fact finding procedure, not an adjudicative one, undertaken by a human rights institution in a vulnerable country rather than a court in a wealthy one. This would be a serious error.
The Commission’s analysis and the evidence it marshaled to inform and support that analysis has immediate relevance, value, and persuasive weight not only for courts currently confronting climate litigation but for the growing universe of courts worldwide that will be addressing similar questions in the years to come.
Moreover, given widespread and sustained interest in this inquiry within the global human rights community, the Commission’s call to national human rights institutions in other countries to take up similar investigations of their own will likely be heeded.
Accordingly, Carbon Majors companies that ignore this report and its implications do so at their peril. They need better lawyers and better leaders.
None of this would have been possible without the diligence and perseverance of the Commission in undertaking this work with limited resources, and completed it against the backdrop of COVID’s catastrophic impacts on the Philippines.
And it would not have been possible, without the courage and extraordinary perseverance of the petitioners themselves. The Philippines owes them a debt. We all do.