It’s extremely easy to get into Britain as an ‘asylum seeker’, says Laurie Wastell. You can pretend to be gay or a political dissident, and soon we can add to that list that you’re a ‘climate refugee’ fleeing the weather.
It’s extremely easy to be allowed into Britain as a refugee or ‘asylum seeker’. You can pretend to be gay. You can claim to be a persecuted dissident for being a member of a political party you know next to nothing about. You can commit a sex crime in Britain and then claim you’ll be persecuted because of it if you’re sent back home. Just one in 100 asylum claims are “genuine”, according to a Home Office whistleblower. If British immigration and asylum law were a colander, it would be all holes and no metal.
And yet now Lefty lawyers and climate activists are hoping to pry it open still further to potential billions of so-called “climate refugees”, on the grounds that standards of living and the weather aren’t always brilliant in places like Africa.
Liberal hearts have long bled for plight of the Dark Continent, of course, but the catalyst for this new wave of legal activism is an extraordinary ruling last year by the International Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the climate-zealot United Nations. In July 2025, its Advisory Opinion on “The Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change” sought to establish an overarching legal framework governing states’ “obligations” around greenhouse gas emissions and their alleged consequences. It’s potent, ambitious stuff. “The ICJ’s message is clear: climate obligations are not aspirational – they are legal, substantive and enforceable,” explains Climate Law, a Columbia Law School blog. Writing in the Daily Sceptic earlier this year, former UN official and public policy professor Ramesh Thakur starkly warned: “The logic underpinning the advisory opinion prepares the ground for individual liability, speech restrictions and legal intimidation.”
Catnip, then, to Lefties the world over. Amnesty International last year hailed the opinion as “a landmark moment for climate justice and accountability”, adding that “the ICJ recognised that it is scientifically possible to determine each state’s contribution to the climate crisis”. Because after all, we all know the gold standard of scientific enquiry is when an activist charity agrees with an activist court.
As a result, we are now seeing the fusion of climate activism with pro-migrant activism. Take the UK-based Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), whose mission is to support migrants to “to have fulfilling lives in the UK”, but earlier this year backed a “three-day climate experience-sharing discussion” in the Tongogara Refugee Camp, Zimbabwe. The conference seems to have involved gathering together various African subsistence farmers to complain about the weather. Problems expounded on included “excessive heat” (imagine!), “violent rainfall”, “damaged shelters” and “limited income opportunities” along with a lack of household electricity and the roads being poor – or to put it more bluntly, the unfortunate fact that they live in Africa. (The write-up neglects to mention that they’re in Zimbabwe, which less than half a century ago was fertile enough to be known as the ‘breadbasket of Africa’ when it was still Rhodesia, and which has a welter of non-climate related Afro-communist reasons for now being a basket case.)
Having started out lamenting the hardships of maintaining a poultry business or tussling with baboons over garden plants, by Day 3 participants have graduated to discussing such exalted topics as the Paris Agreement, the “Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction” and the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity, which no doubt they all have very strong opinions about. Not surprisingly, the recommendations to emerge from this Refugee Coalition for Climate Action talking shop aligned neatly with typical Lefty do-gooder talking points: more money, more refugee ‘inclusion’ and a Climate Resilience Action Plan are what’s sorely needed. It’s easy to see how such propaganda efforts are designed to pull on Western heartstrings. Regardless of any of the obvious reasons for Africans’ low living standards, green zealot do-gooders now want to claim that every hungry mouth, scraped knee and overturned oxcart south of Gibraltar is somehow the fault of Westerners and their dastardly carbon emissions.
And now, thanks to the ICJ, a pseudo-legal avenue is emerging for the supposed victims of bad weather to seek recompense for their misfortune by being rehoused in the West. Last month, UK migrant charities including the JCWI, Earth Refuge and Refugee Legal Support published a “UK Toolkit on Climate, Disasters and Protection Claims”, which is “designed to help lawyers identify where climate change and disasters are already relevant to the cases in front of them, and to weave those factors into existing asylum, protection and human rights arguments”. It seems this weaving will put the Bayeux Tapestry to shame. Earth Refugee Director Yumna Kamel warns practitioners that “the climate dimension [of refugees’ claims] is usually embedded within accounts of persecution and may be missed without deliberate questioning”. The toolkit thus provides “triage questions on weather patterns” since “clients may not immediately disclose or identify these issues as relevant” and may need a little coaxing to “recognise invisible patterns”. Everything can be down to the weather if you look closely enough, you see. Refugees out of Sudan, for instance, might be minded to focus on the bloody power struggle between government and paramilitary forces that has displaced an estimated 14 million people since 2023. But have they considered that their woes might really have been caused by one too many Surrey mums doing the school run in a Land Rover?
One question is whether this is legal activism via climate alarmism or really climate activism via the law. “As a practitioner,” Kamel notes, “it is important to remember that the terms ‘climate refugee’ or ‘disaster refugee’ carry no legal weight.” Climate change is not, as yet, a de facto reason a refugee claim must be accepted, even if these types are pushing for it to be, since under the 1951 Refugee Convention a refugee must be subject to persecution which requires human agency. Instead, climate issues are to be used as an additional factor to bolster existing claims.
Nevertheless, the toolkit also hopes to change the legal landscape by encouraging the use of climate attribution ‘science’ to dramatically widen the scope of potential claimants, by arguing that ‘natural disasters’ – not usually within the scope of refugee law – can be caused by humans. “Where the immediate source of the feared harm is drought, flooding or another physical hazard, but attribution evidence demonstrates that anthropogenic climate change has materially contributed to its likelihood or severity, the rationale for treating that harm as ‘naturally occurring’ may require reconsideration.” The refugee claims thus also represent strategic litigation to develop “climate jurisprudence”, putting us on the path to a bonanza of lawsuits every time there’s a flood, hurricane or drought anywhere in the world, and a vastly inflated candidate pool for global refugees.
Lawyers are not scientists, but they needn’t worry, for no whit of empirical proof or scientific literacy is required for such claims to be made, a fact the activists freely admit. As another climate litigation toolkit from University of New South Wales puts it: “Cases concerning the impacts of climate change and disasters do not require a specialised understanding of climate science.” Earth Refuge et al., for its part, leans heavily on the opinion of the activist lawyers at the ICJ, which it says has “confirmed that climate change is unequivocally caused by human activity” – this apparently means case closed.
Yet while activist toolkits set great store by ‘attribution science’, the reality is that these are pseudo-scientific models which have no predictive value and cannot be falsified. After all, that’s precisely the point of them. “Weather attribution computer models,” writes the Daily Sceptic’s Chris Morrison, “were first designed to create useful press headlines and to stick it to oil and gas companies in the law courts.” It seems the green lawyers are now realising they’re onto a goldmine.
