> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Telling Them Exactly What He Thinks - URL: https://goodoil.news/telling-them-exactly-what-he-thinks/ - Published: 2026-08-19T01:00:41.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-19T01:00:40.000Z - Description: The ICJ refused to publish Ian Callinan’s scathing criticisms. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: Law What on earth were they thinking? An old adage in law is to never ask a question unless you already know what the answer will be. The International Court of Justice would apparently add: never ask a distinguished jurist for his opinion of you if you’re not going to like the answer. And that is just what they did. They didn’t like the answer. In fact, the answer was so uncomplimentary that they refused to publish it. > [A former High Court judge](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/top-australian-judge-ian-callinan-blasts-world-court-for-wading-into-climate-change-policy/news-story/940b58308577adcc207b64421db79e4f?ref=goodoil.news) has delivered a scathing assessment of the International Court of Justice on which he once served, criticising the court for wading in on matters such as climate change policy, and slamming its attempts to censor his analysis of the body. > > **Ian Callinan**, former justice of the High Court who also served as an ad hoc judge of the ICJ in 2014, was invited by the ICJ to write an essay as part of a publication for the court’s 80th anniversary. He obliged. The court then discovered, to its delicate institutional horror, that the man who once sat on its bench had the temerity to notice a few awkward truths. > Correspondence released by Mr Callinan shows that the ICJ was concerned about his criticism of the court’s 2025 advisory opinion on climate change – which has already driven a number of legal challenges in Australia and been cited by government agencies – the lack of legal practitioners from the United Kingdom, and the tendency of some ICJ judges to pick up work as arbitrators in international disputes. They responded exactly as you’d expect a globalist stalking-horse to. > Soon after Mr Callinan submitted his essay to the ICJ, he received a response from the court’s legal officer informing him that the editorial committee had “some reservations about certain excerpts from your article”. > > “ … the committee finds the highlighted passages problematic and would kindly ask you to amend or revise them,” the email read. Callinan responded exactly as anyone who’s followed his career would likewise expect. > In his reply, Mr Callinan said the ICJ would either publish his chapter in full or not at all, and noted that it would likely “find a home in a reputable legal or public affairs journal” if it was not. Sixty-three years in the law, nine and a half of them on the High Court, and he had never before been asked to submit to censorship of honest opinions and accurately stated facts. The court’s president then made a personal appeal for “certain adjustments”. In other words, make it a feel-good paean, not an inconvenient polemic. Callinan promptly withdrew the essay entirely, expressing his “disillusionment that a seemingly independent creature of the United Nations should have such a tender sensitivity to a statement of indisputably correct facts”. The essay will now appear under the Institute of Public Affairs’ Legal Rights series, complete with the full correspondence. Readers will be able to judge for themselves what the ICJ found so unpalatable. Did somebody say, ‘Streisand Effect’? So, what got their globalist knickers in such a bunch? Chief among the offending passages was Callinan’s assessment of the court’s 2025 advisory opinion on climate change. That opinion has already been waved about by Australian agencies and cited in at least four local cases challenging major projects. > The questions asked of the court by the UN and the answers given, Mr Callinan wrote, assumed that global warming, climate change and catastrophic ensuing events were unarguably correct. He also noted that the court’s meeting with the International Panel on Climate Change when formulating the opinion did not feature any cross-examination of any expert. > > He described the ICJ’s climate change opinion as “unpersuasive” and said it did not enhance the standing and authority of the court. > > “It gives the appearance that the ICJ may be an echelon of the IPCC and the executive of the United Nations itself.” *No!* Golly, why would anyone think *that*? Callinan called the opinion unpersuasive and damaging to the court’s standing. He was right. Once an international bench starts treating contested scientific and policy claims as legal axioms, it ceases to be a court and becomes an arm of the global administrative class. The court was equally unhappy about Callinan’s observation that no British lawyer has sat as a permanent judge since 2018\. He wondered aloud whether this was a quiet reprisal for Brexit. > “The United Kingdom is the progenitor of the Westminster system of government and the Common Law Method, and on any view representative of a major system of law that has been adopted by old and new nations across the world,” he wrote. > > “It is difficult to understand, therefore … how the General Assembly could reasonably omit from the composition of the ICJ at any time and for any period, a candidate from the United Kingdom.” Then there is the small matter of moonlighting. The court’s own statute forbids judges from any other professional occupation, yet allows the court itself to decide any doubt on the point. In other words, a judge accused of a conflict gets to help decide whether the conflict exists. Callinan suggested the obvious remedy: full disclosure of extrajudicial income. ICJ salaries and pensions – which are untaxed – already compare more than favourably with those of the highest courts in Britain, America and Australia. Transparency would not exactly leave them destitute. None of this is especially radical. It is simply the application of ordinary legal standards to an institution that has grown used to floating above them. But clearly all-too-used to imposing censorship on dissenting voices. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**