South African communities living along the Eastern Cape coast won a five-year legal fight on August 14, when the country’s Constitutional Court permanently blocked Shell’s offshore oil and gas exploration permit, ruling that their rights had been violated from the very beginning of the permitting process.
The ruling matters most to the people who were never properly consulted. Justice Narandran Jody Kollapen, writing for the seven-justice majority, was direct about what the earlier failures meant for those communities. “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,” he 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.” Two judges on the panel dissented.
The case stretches back to 2014, when oil company Impact Africa received the original exploration permit. In 2021, Impact Africa transferred a 50 percent stake in its exploration rights to Shell. The permit was renewed twice without meaningful community consultation or adequate consideration of environmental, community, and climate impacts. When a third renewal was sought, South Africa’s High Court blocked it in 2022 on exactly those grounds.
The story did not end there. A 2024 ruling by South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal took a softer line, suspending the High Court’s decision and allowing the permit to be renewed on the condition that Shell and Impact Africa undertake a proper consultation process. That approach was designed to protect the companies’ reported 1.1 billion rand investment (approximately C$95 million) while acknowledging their earlier failures.
The Constitutional Court rejected that compromise outright.
Kollapen argued that late-stage consultation, offered more than a decade after the permit was first granted, could not repair a fundamental violation of community rights. The court also identified a second critical flaw in the Supreme Court of Appeal’s reasoning: it had focused narrowly on fixing the consultation process but had not addressed the companies’ failure to weigh broader environmental and social impacts when the permit was originally issued.
Meanwhile, Kollapen situated the ruling within a rapidly shifting global legal landscape. He pointed to a 2025 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice establishing that states can be held accountable for failing to address climate change, and noted that within three years, three major international tribunals had delivered opinions on states’ obligations in this area. Though advisory in form, these opinions interpret binding treaties and customary international law, forming what he called “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.” The ruling, he wrote, reflects “a moment in international law in which climate change has moved from the margins of environmental diplomacy to the centre of legal accountability.”
Angela van der Berg, director of the Global Environmental Law Centre, called the decision “a real milestone in climate justice” in The Conversation. She noted it clarifies that consultation cannot be treated as merely “an administrative box to tick.”
The decision carries consequences beyond this single permit. By blocking the renewal, the court also prevented Shell and Impact Africa from circumventing a moratorium on new exploration rights that was imposed after the original permit was granted. Reuters reported that the ruling adds to a growing series of legal setbacks that have “dampened investor appetite” and delayed offshore exploration projects across South Africa.
For the communities along the Eastern Cape coast, the question now is what meaningful consultation looks like going forward, and whether the legal standard the court has set will hold the next permit applicant to the same account from day one.