3 The Philippines is visited by around twenty typhoons every year. In 2013, it had the misfortune of being battered by one of the strongest typhoons in recorded history, Super Typhoon Haiyan (local: Yolanda), which caused the death of at least six thousand people within just a few hours from landfall.8 To date, we have yet to fully recover from its devastating impacts, even as we continue to suffer from the onslaught of other extreme weather events. Aside from presenting climate change as a human rights case, the Petition highlighted a novel assertion, which was that private business enterprises, not just States, have the obligation to respect and uphold human rights, as advocated under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP-BHR). The Petition prayed that the “Carbon Majors” be held responsible for their contribution to climate change, which, as alleged, was negatively impacting the human rights of the Filipino people. When this Petition was filed before us, there was truly no established legal precedent–as there still is none to date–to help us navigate the case. Our Commission lacked, as well, the financial and human resources necessary to handle an undertaking of such magnitude. Indeed, following the refusal of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to hear the case of the Inuit ten years earlier, nobody would have questioned the CHRP had it refused to take cognizance of the case. Some of those who were impleaded in the Petition–the big privately-owned oil companies or the so-called “Carbon Majors”–asked our Commission to dismiss the Petition, arguing that we were not a court of law, but just a human rights institution. They contended that we had no jurisdiction to conduct hearings involving allegations of liability. Or that, even if we had the jurisdiction to conduct such hearings, we had no jurisdiction to consider the subject matter of climate change, which they thought to be not within the realm of civil and political rights. They strongly argued that the Philippine Constitution only allowed our Commission to investigate cases involving civil and political rights. We explained that all human rights are interrelated, interdependent, and indivisible; that one cannot consider civil and political rights separately from economic, social and cultural rights.We pointed out that such was humanity’s evolving understanding of, and consciousness about, human rights. 8 National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, Final Report re Effects of Typhoon “YOLANDA” (Haiyan) (2013) available at http://ndrrmc.gov.ph/attachments/article/1329/FINAL_ REPORT_re_Effects_of_Typhoon_YOLANDA_(HAIYAN)_06-09NOV2013.pdf (last accessed Nov. 20, 2019).