On 16 April 2019, I superglued my hands to the pavement outside the headquarters of the oil company Shell in London. I tried to get to the main door but fell short as I was surrounded by dozens of neon-jacketed policemen. I had been a legal adviser in the United Nations climate negotiations for nearly 30 years – but that Tuesday I decided it was time to join those who had chosen to break the law [Yamin was not charged].
It might have seemed like an unusual thing for a lawyer with my profile to do. For over a decade, I have been using my legal training to help governments (primarily of small island states) negotiate and implement commitments under treaties, such as the 2015 Paris Agreement, and through national laws. Such treaties and laws provide a crucial framework for action. Alongside my activism, I have continued this kind of professional work. But while it is necessary, I have come to understand that it is no longer enough.
It is not only that this work is taking too long. While climate litigation ratchets up the pressure, these cases tend to ask governments to control air pollution, or do a little more mitigation of greenhouse gases, for example, rather than asking for systemic, radical change. They also shy away from seeking reparations for loss and damage already running into billions of dollars, the burden of which is on the poor. Litigation can also leave plaintiff communities feeling disempowered when the lawyers involved are not connected to the social movements and political demands of the communities they seek to champion.
I have come to the conclusion that any solutions the courts can deliver right now will not be fast or sweeping enough to deliver the transformational changes we need in the next few years, unless and until they are accompanied by people rising up in a global movement that is powerful enough to take on polluters and complacent politicians. This movement cannot rely on petitions, marches and elections every five years to do the job. It has to embrace breaking the law and be based on peaceful civil disobedience. It must have many different components, a movement of movements.
When I think about my 30 years as a lawyer in the climate field I am filled with sadness and rage. In these very years the crisis has accelerated. I did not appreciate the scale of destruction. Nor how richer countries would export their dirtiest industries, such as textiles and manufacturing, to China, India, Bangladesh, and my home country, Pakistan. Like many in the climate movement, I worried about how I would look talking about “global elites” and saying something as radical as “the system is broken.” I played by the rules.
It took something of a breakdown – personal and political – to come to a new realisation. I had been somewhat paralysed, burnt out by the annual cycle of UN climate summits, known as “COPs”, and trying to get the 2015 Paris Agreement implemented on the basis of climate science. I was also suffering from a deep depression triggered by the untimely deaths of my mother, father and brother in close succession. All the hopes and hard work I had put into the Paris Agreement seemed to be unravelling, particularly with the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2017.
I felt powerless and angry: I withdrew from work because I felt we had failed, and that it was too late to do anything useful. But I was surrounded by a loving family and had the good fortune to take several courses and spent time in wilderness. I read Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, which is addressed to activists and focuses on how they can keep going in tough times. I allowed myself to grieve. I read the histories of social movements that had overthrown slavery and colonialism; tackled disenfranchisement and violence against women, gay and transgender people; and got legislation passed to protects workers’ rights, including access to healthcare and social welfare.
Finally, at the age of 55, I have found my voice and the courage to speak my truth as a mother, as a migrant, as a lawyer and as an activist. Lawyers are often rightly seen as part of the establishment, but we also have a special part to play in mobilising mass movements. Look, for example, at two of the greatest movement-builders of the 20th century: Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Both were lawyers who first worked within the law, launching campaigns based on petitions, marches and litigation.
But they came to understand that no court could overturn the complex mix of social norms, rules and systemic political abuses of power that entrenched discrimination across so many levels of Indian and South African society. Ultimately, they chose law-breaking as the key, decisive tool in their successful opposition to imperialism and apartheid.
We must understand, as they did, that the necessary change will not take place if we stay within the rules.
This is an edited version of a chapter in the anthology “The Revolution Will Not Be Litigated” (OR Books), published in the autumn 2023 issue of New Humanist. Subscribe now.
