State Responsibility & Political Disasters: Legal Redress

Torrential rains, cyclones, and monsoon storms caused devastating floods, landslides, and mudslides across South and Southeast Asia in late November 2025, impacting millions and resulting in nearly 1,000 deaths. The scale of the harm reflects political choices that systematically produce vulnerability and transform foreseeable natural hazards into mass human suffering.

Politically Manufactured Disasters

From Sumatra in Indonesia to southern Malaysia, southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Vietnam, wide swathes of the region have been ravaged. In Indonesia alone, approximately 3.2 million people are affected, with over 700 deaths, 2,600 injuries, and 504 people missing. The Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia have also documented hundreds of deaths, widespread displacement, and massive destruction of homes and infrastructure.

These disasters follow a pattern similar to the 2022 floods in Pakistan, the 2023 Rio Grande do Sul disaster in Brazil, and repeated landslides in the Philippines.

Underlying Drivers Beyond Weather

While climate pressures intensify rainfall and extreme weather, these events are not solely natural phenomena. Consistent underlying drivers include deforestation, extractive expansion, loss of water absorption areas, unsafe land-use planning, regulatory failure, and corruption.

International law distinguishes between natural hazards and disasters, defining disasters as the result of hazardous events interacting with human exposure, vulnerability, and capacity. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, adopted by UN Member States in 2015, emphasizes that disaster risk is shaped by governance choices, land use, and institutional capacity.

Disaster scholars argue that disasters are socially and politically produced, intersecting with vulnerability created by political and economic decisions. Disaster risk is an inherent product of development processes that generate socio-territorial inequality, and communities often lack control over key drivers of risk like land use and infrastructure planning.

International Legal Responsibility

International law attributes responsibility not only for actions but also for omissions. Under the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, a state commits an internationally wrongful act when conduct attributable to it fails to conform with an international obligation. This can include failing to regulate or prevent foreseeable harm.

The right to life under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights imposes positive obligations on states to protect life against foreseeable threats, including environmental risks. Regional courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court, have held that disasters linked to regulatory failure engage state responsibility.

Ex Post State Obligations

Following a disaster, international law imposes obligations including investigating the causes, providing effective remedies and reparations, ensuring equality and non-discrimination in response and reconstruction, and providing guarantees of non-repetition.

Investigations must be independent and transparent, identifying not only immediate causes but also the regulatory failures and policy decisions that contributed to the disaster. Reparations must, as far as possible, eliminate the consequences of the wrongful act, including restitution, compensation, and environmental restoration.

Guarantees of non-repetition require states to reform land-use planning, enforce environmental regulations, and integrate disaster-risk reduction into development policy.

The floods and landslides in South and Southeast Asia were the foreseeable outcome of political and regulatory choices. International law increasingly recognizes that where hazards are transformed into catastrophe through governance failure, states incur obligations that persist long after the waters recede.