Ten Australians are suing the federal government at the United Nations, arguing that its continued support for fossil fuel exports directly violates their human rights by fuelling the climate extremes that have upended their lives.
The complaint, lodged with the UN Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), is the first legal claim against a state for climate harm since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a landmark advisory opinion in July 2025. That opinion found states had a legal obligation to take measures to prevent significant harm to the climate. Australia was among 140 countries that passed a UN General Assembly resolution in May 2026 endorsing the opinion and warning that failing to curb fossil fuel production could constitute an “internationally wrongful act”.
The case, described by its organisers as the “hard truths case”, is backed by the Human Rights Law Centre, Environmental Justice Australia and the US-based Earthjustice. The claimants argue that by approving and supporting new coal and gas developments for export, the government is exacerbating the extreme weather events that have injured them and that this amounts to a breach of their rights under the ICCPR. If the UN committee finds in their favour, it can recommend actions the government should take; as a party to the covenant, Australia would be bound to consider those findings in good faith, though the recommendations are not enforceable.
Claimants describe climate trauma
Brendon Donohue, 33, is legally blind and has limited movement due to Peters plus syndrome. During the February 2022 floods in Brisbane’s West End, he was trapped alone in his second-storey apartment for ten days after the lift, intercom and front entrance shut down. “It was terrifying,” he says. “The whole street was badly impacted with water. The power went out, which made me not able to contact anyone. I ran out of food but couldn’t get any into the building.”
Jack Egan lost his home in Batemans Bay on the New South Wales south coast to bushfires on New Year’s Eve 2019. He watched flames consume his front deck and lick through his windows, and ran through raining embers to escape. He spent hours unable to find his partner, Cath, and feared she had joined the 33 people who died that fire season. “I thought for some time that she was dead,” he says.
Mel Fisher endured Adelaide’s heatwave last summer from her small brick public housing home in suburban Elizabeth Vale. As the South Australian capital faced multiple days above 40C, the concrete walls and tin roof trapped the heat for days. A night when the minimum temperature was 34C exacerbated her painful auto-inflammatory skin condition, leaving her bedridden. “I have poor insulation, the interior walls are all concrete and I have a tin roof. I genuinely thought I might die from the heat,” Fisher says. “Sometimes the pain gets so bad that it can feel like my skin is ripping and tearing.”
Latisha Francis, 25, a Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna and Narungga woman studying marine and wildlife conservation, spent last year coping with an unprecedented toxic algal bloom linked to a spike in sea temperatures off the Adelaide coast. The bloom killed wildlife and drove her family away from a coastline that has been their home for millennia. “It was so distressing, from an Indigenous perspective,” she says. “So much of our culture was being shared by the ocean. A lot of people just distance themselves from the water now because they are too scared to go near it.”
Donohue, Egan, Fisher and Francis are joined by six other Australians in the complaint, each with their own story of climate-related harm.
Linking fossil fuel exports to human rights violations
The core argument that the claimants must establish is that the extreme events they suffered have been made more likely and more severe by the burning of fossil fuels. Professor David Karoly, an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, former lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a member of the Climate Council, says international and Australian agencies have repeatedly demonstrated that emissions from burning coal, oil and gas significantly increase the risk of damage from bushfires, floods and land and marine heatwaves.
But the complaint goes further. It argues that the federal government should be held accountable not only for domestic emissions but for the much larger emissions released overseas after Australia exports its coal and gas. “Australia has to take responsibility for its emissions, whether it is domestic emissions or the larger emissions overseas after it exports coal and gas,” Karoly says.
This argument has not yet succeeded in Australian courts. In July 2025, the Federal Court found in Pabai Pabai v Commonwealth of Australia that the government did not owe a common-law duty of care to protect Torres Strait Islanders from climate change – though it agreed in forceful language that the islands faced a bleak future if urgent action was not taken. That case is being appealed. The UN complaint faces a different legal test under the ICCPR.
In a separate but related matter, the UN Human Rights Committee found in September 2022 that Australia had failed to implement adequate climate adaptation measures for Torres Strait Islanders, violating their rights to protection of their private life and enjoyment of their culture under the ICCPR. The committee did not, however, find a violation of the right to life on the information before it.
Domestic judicial review challenges, such as the “Living Wonders” case brought by Environmental Justice Australia against two coal mining proposals in New South Wales under the EPBC Act, have also been rejected. The Federal Court found no legal error in the Environment Minister’s reasoning that the mines would not significantly increase global emissions or that their emissions were too small to warrant detailed assessment.
Government defence and legal prospects
The Australian government is expected to argue in response to the UN complaint that it is backing renewable energy and cutting emissions at home, aiming to develop clean export industries to replace fossil fuels, and that there is little point in damaging trade relationships by cutting off coal and gas when demand persists and other countries are selling them.
Independent MP Zali Steggall, who supports the complaint, says it highlights a “glaring inconsistency” in climate policy: that the country is taking steps to cut domestic emissions as it expands support for fossil fuel exports. “The stories of these claimants show climate change is not an abstract future threat,” she says.
Harj Narulla, a London-based barrister with Doughty Street Chambers and Oxford University who specialises in climate litigation and is not party to the complaint, says Australia has a “huge amount of liability and exposure” given the scale of its fossil fuel exports. “I think Australia has a very, very challenging case to answer,” he says. “It’s the first complaint of its kind we’ve seen against Australia, but I don’t think it will be the last.”
