The Santa Marta Conference convenes in the midst of escalating war, colonial aggression and genocide in a brutal might-makes-right era, closely interlinked with the needs of a fossil fuel addicted world economy. From Venezuela to Cuba, from Palestine to Iran, the US-Israeli axis perpetrates crimes of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, in pursuit of control of fossil fuel resources, actively attempting to cut all energy supplies to those that don’t succumb to their designs. This is precisely why the conference cannot treat fossil fuels only as an emissions problem managed through orderly transition timelines. Fossil fuels are being routed, traded, insured, and weaponized through systems of war, occupation, and colonial power. Any transition framework that cannot confront that reality will fail its most basic test.

Climate governance regulates emissions. It does not regulate the production, trade, insurance, refining, and supply chains that continue to funnel fossil fuels to genocide, colonial war, and military occupation. Trade and investment regimes ensure the protection of fossil capital but do nothing to stop fossil fuel complicity in grave violations of international law. Yet, states that move fuel through their jurisdictions, as well as the corporations that do so, have clear obligations under international law. Vitol moves crude through the Saras refinery in Sardinia to genocidal Israel. Drummond has continued coal exports through intermediaries to Israel. Chevron is also the main extractor of fossil gas claimed by Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, profiting from fossil gas extraction contracts that bring Israel hundreds of millions of dollars annually in revenues from payments for its gas extraction license, helping to finance Israel’s war chest. Glencore is part of the upstream chain. These are not isolated corporate actors. They operate through a legal and political order states have built and maintained.

Palestine makes the governance gap impossible to ignore. Gaza’s offshore gas fields lie in Palestinian waters but Israel’s illegal military occupation exploits these resources and bars Palestinian control over them. Much of the West Bank’s solar potential lies under full Israeli control, where Palestinian renewable infrastructure is routinely obstructed or destroyed while Israeli settlement energy systems expand uninterrupted. Energy denial is not incidental to occupation. It is one of its instruments. Israeli forces have killed over 72,000 Palestinians since October 2023 in the world’s first livestreamed genocide. The genocide has not ended, and yet, current just transition frameworks assume that the peoples being “transitioned” hold sovereignty over their own resources and energy systems. Where sovereignty and the right to self-determination are denied, transition cannot be just.

The ICJ has declared Israel’s occupation illegal, and that it is committing the crime against humanity of apartheid and plausibly genocide. Israel’s exploitation of Palestinian resources is accordingly unlawful. All states are obligated to prevent trade and investment sustaining these crimes. If fossil fuels can continue reaching a state committing atrocity crimes while the world speaks abstractly of phase-out, the problem is not only climate delay. It is fossil-fuelled impunity.

Colombia has already shown the possibility of state action. By moving to halt coal exports to Israel, Colombia has established a precedent: fossil fuel trade is not neutral, and states can act to prevent their energy exports from materially sustaining mass violence. Yet, a global enforcement architecture is needed to ensure policies translate into reality. Türkiye has declared a full trade embargo, yet crude oil continues flowing through its territory.

PICS and Disrupt Power investigations traced Brazilian crude sold to Vitol, refined at the Saras SpA refinery in Sardinia, and shipped onward to Israel through obscured routing and maritime evasions. These are not isolated loopholes. They reveal a system designed to preserve fossil fuel trade in the absence of real supply-side governance. Whatever governance architecture emerges from Santa Marta must be institutional and multilateral, not dependent on any single government. Above all, it should be fully in harmony with international law and the obligations to prevent and punish the commission of atrocity crimes and grave human rights violations.

Where governments and international institutions fail to fulfill their obligations, people and civil society need to take the lead. The Palestinian-led BDS movement and its global allies are already enforcing accountability from below. Workers, activists, researchers, legal experts, and innumerable civil society organizations have come together to pressure governments and corporations to end complicity. Dockworkers across the Mediterranean and beyond are increasingly refusing to handle Israel-bound military and dual-use cargo. Brazilian oil unions have signaled willingness to act. Colombian mining communities are organizing around the coal decree. They are the political base of the energy embargo, and they are doing what international law says states are obligated to do: refusing to aid or assist grave internationally wrongful acts.

Military sectors remain among the largest institutional consumers of fossil fuels anywhere, yet they sit almost entirely outside climate governance. This contradiction is now impossible to ignore: military operations are disrupting energy systems in real time while climate governance continues to treat military emissions as marginal or invisible. States expanding military infrastructure and rearmament programmes while claiming climate leadership are producing a contradiction that Santa Marta cannot leave unaddressed. Demilitarization is part of fossil fuel phase-out, not separate from it.

What is needed now is not more language about transition, but governance that can actually govern.

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We call on those convening in Santa Marta to do six things.

One. Make an energy embargo a central political question of this conference. States must be pressed to cease fossil fuel transfers that materially sustain genocide, war crimes, illegal occupation, or other grave violations of international humanitarian law. Energy embargoes are not exceptional gestures. They are instruments of ending complicity in grave human rights violations.

Two. Build the enforcement architecture that makes embargoes real. Mandate a global supply-chain transparency instrument with public shipment tracking, end-destination disclosure, and anti-circumvention measures covering ship-to-ship transfers, AIS manipulation, intermediary refining, and opaque trader structures.

Three. Demand protection for workers and unions as frontline actors in just transition enforcement. Those who refuse to load, refine, transport, or insure fossil fuel cargoes linked to atrocity crimes must be protected from dismissal, prosecution, and retaliation.

Four. Recognize energy sovereignty as a foundational principle of just transition. Colonized and occupied peoples must have the right to control their own energy resources and systems. A fossil fuel treaty without this principle will reproduce the hierarchies that built the fossil economy.

Five. Give communities legal standing to refuse extraction and trigger accountability. Free, prior and informed consent cannot remain a procedural fiction. Communities must be able to contest extraction, withdraw consent, and activate binding obligations on states and corporations.

Six. Open a pathway toward a binding Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty that addresses production, trade, supply chains, and fossil fuel complicity in atrocity crimes. It must include energy sovereignty, supply-chain transparency, worker protection, and international-law conditionality in climate and reconstruction finance. The treaty must also establish reparative finance obligations on states and corporations whose fossil fuel production and trade have materially sustained conflict, international crimes, and ecological destruction.

The fossil fuel economy was built through colonial extraction, unequal exchange, and organized violence. States and corporations built it together, and they maintain it together. A transition that changes the fuel source while preserving these arrangements does not break with that system. It adapts it.

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There is no just transition without decolonization.

There is no fossil fuel governance without supply-chain accountability.

There is no climate justice without Palestinian liberation.‍

This statement is prepared by the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy (PICS) and is open for endorsement by civil society organisations, trade unions, social movements, and allied actors.

Contact: info@palclimateinstitute.org

Signatories:

Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy (PICS)

Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS)

The Palestine New Federation of Trade Unions

The Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (Stop the Wall)

Disrupt Power

Global Energy Embargo for Palestine (GEEP)

Global Sumud Flotilla

Climate Justice Flotilla