South Africa’s top court has blocked Shell’s offshore oil and gas exploration permit in the Eastern Cape, saying that belated community consultation cannot fix the permit’s unlawful origins and citing climate change as part of a “global reckoning” in international law.

In the decision that ended a five-year legal battle, Justice Narandran Jody Kollapen wrote that a convergence of recent legal decisions “reflects a moment in international law in which climate change has moved from the margins of environmental diplomacy to the centre of legal accountability.” The judge ruled that “decisions implicating our environment demand justification, diligence, and coherence in state conduct,” adding that “community and cultural rights are also implicated.”

The Aug. 14 ruling delivered by the Constitutional Court of South Africa is “a real milestone in climate justice,” Global Environmental Law Centre director Angela van der Berg wrote in The Conversation. Not only does it set a precedent for future climate cases in South Africa, but it also clarifies that consultation is “not an administrative box to tick.”

Reuters wrote that the decision adds to a string of cases that have “dampened investor appetite” and delayed offshore exploration in South Africa.

In the recent judgement, Kollapen and six other justices concurred to overturn an earlier decision by South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal. Two judges on the Constitutional Court panel dissented.

The decision follows a series of legal battles over a permit awarded in 2014 to oil company Impact Africa, which in 2021 transferred a 50% stake of its exploration rights along South Africa’s Wild Coast to Shell. The permit has been renewed twice, but a third application was blocked in 2022 by The High Court of South Africa. That court determined that the companies had not carried out a meaningful consultation process and that environmental, community, and climate impacts were not—but should have been—considered when the permit was issued.

A 2024 Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) ruling suspended the High Court’s decision and allowed the permit to be renewed so long as the companies undertook a meaningful consultation process on earlier issues. That approach was meant to recognize Shell’s and Impact Africa’s past consultation failings while potentially preserving the oil companies’ 1.1 billion rand expenditure on the project, the equivalent of around C$95 million.

But Kollapen argued that consulting during a renewal application could not correct past wrongs.

“To tell communities, more than a decade after the fact, that they may now be consulted, would not be curative to their right to dignity,” Kollapen wrote. “Instead, it would say to them that the violation of their rights was not a matter of substance but rather a matter of process.”

Allowing the renewal to proceed would have also allowed the companies to sidestep a moratorium on new exploration rights that was imposed after the permit was granted.

The Court also pointed out that the SCA only suggested correcting the faulty consultation process, but did not include the failure to consider broader environmental and social impacts. Kollapen said other decisions, like the International Court of Justice’s 2025 advisory opinion that states can be held accountable for failure to address climate change, make clear that such issues need to be considered when issuing permits. This argument is supported in South Africa’s constitution, which not only enshrines the right to an environment that is not harmful to well-being, but also directs courts to consider international law when interpreting rights, as van der Berg wrote in an earlier post.

“In the past three years, three major international tribunals have delivered opinions addressing states’ obligations in relation to climate change,” Kollapen wrote. “While advisory in form, these opinions authoritatively interpret binding treaties and customary international law.”

Which means those opinions “form part of an emerging and coherent body of jurisprudence reflecting what can properly be described as a global reckoning with the legal and anthropological implications of climate change.”