Judges have been ruling on complaints about national failures to curb carbon emissions. The court ruled in favor of a Swiss women’s group, saying some rights had been violated, but it threw out two similar actions.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday delivered rulings in a group of landmark climate change cases aimed at making national governments meet treaty obligations to cut greenhouse emissions.
In one of the three cases, it upheld a complaint by a group of elderly Swiss women that government failures to properly oversee emissions did violate their human rights.
While activists have enjoyed past success in domestic proceedings, the verdict marks the first time an international court made such a ruling on climate change.
What did the court say?
In a case brought by some 2,000 members of Switzerland’s Senior Women for Climate Protection, judges found that the Swiss government had violated some human rights by missing past emissions reduction targets.
The women had protested their government’s “woefully inadequate” efforts to fight climate change. They said older women were at particular risk of dying during heatwaves and demanded a ruling that would slash fossil fuel emissions much faster than planned.
Judges agreed that there “had been critical gaps in the process of putting in place the relevant domestic regulatory framework.”
These, the court said, included “a failure by the Swiss authorities to quantify, through a carbon budget or otherwise, national greenhouse gas emissions limitations.”
Disappointment for Portuguese group
However, the court ruled inadmissible a case brought by six Portuguese youths seeking to force 32 European governments to take more ambitious action to curb climate change.
The young activists said the rising temperatures threaten their right to life. The group’s case was against every EU country, plus Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Russia.
The court’s dismissal of the case referred to “the fact that the applicants had not pursued any legal avenue in Portugal concerning their complaints,” and that there was no territorial jurisdiction when it came to the other 31 countries.
Ex-mayor’s complaint dismissed
Judges also ruled against a French former mayor, who had sought to force the government to do more to fight climate change.
Damien Careme, who was mayor of the coastal community of Grande-Synthe and went on to become a member of the European Parliament, filed a suit attacking the alleged “deficiencies” of the French state. He argued that such shortcomings raised the risk of his town being submerged under the North Sea.
However, the court ruled that, because he had no longer lived in France and had no “relevant links” to the town, he could not claim victim status.
‘Just the beginning,’ says Thunberg
The verdicts had been eagerly anticipated. Climate activists including Sweden’s Greta Thunberg had gathered outside the court building to await the decisions on Tuesday morning.
Thunberg, founder of the Fridays for Future activist group, said the ruling on Switzerland was “only the beginning.”
“All over the world more and more people are taking their government to court, holding them responsible for their actions,” Thunberg said.
DW’s Bernd Riegert, speaking from the court, said the fact that climate change had been recognized as a matter for the ECHR represented a first.
“There are more cases pending here in Strasbourg and also pending in other courts all over the world and this could be a kind of a guidance,” said Riegert.
What did the cases have in common?
The plaintiffs complained their governments were not doing enough to tackle climate change.
Their lawyers wanted the ECHR to rule that political leaders have a legal duty to limit global warming to a rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
The threshold is in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.
Verdicts by the Grand Chamber of the ECHR’s 17 judges can establish precedents for the Convention’s 46 signatories.
Lawyers for the activists had argued that any political and civil protections guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, which the ECHR upholds, are meaningless if the planet is uninhabitable.
Legal teams for individual countries facing the legal challenges said the blame for climate change could not rest with individual states, demanding the cases be dismissed.
Source: Dw
