The European Court of Human Rights has dealt with three climate lawsuits and has now handed down its verdict. In one case, six young people from Portugal sued 32 countries, including Germany. They accused the countries of exacerbating the climate crisis and thereby endangering the future of their generation. The reason for their complaints was the devastating forest fires of 2017 in their home country. In addition, a French ex-politician had turned to the judges because, in his opinion, France had not taken sufficient measures to prevent climate change. Both lawsuits were dismissed.
Only one senior group from Switzerland supported by Greenpeace was successful. She wants to ensure that the Alpine republic has to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions more. The so-called climate seniors state that their right to life and to private and family life are being violated by a lack of climate protection measures. The judges ruled on Tuesday in Strasbourg that some women’s rights had been violated because of the Swiss government’s failures to protect the climate.
The case is reminiscent of the most prominent climate lawsuit in Germany: activists from Fridays for Future and various environmental organizations sued the federal government in 2019 because the Climate Protection Act was not enough for them. The court ruled in favor of the activists and the law had to be improved in 2021. But little has changed. Two years later, BUND activists sued again because the traffic light coalition did not adhere to the legally established standards for CO2 emissions.
In other countries, too, people are dissatisfied with their governments’ climate policies. According to the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, over 2,000 climate lawsuits have been filed worldwide, a quarter of them between 2020 and 2022.
There is also protest elsewhere: the island state of Vanuatu in the South Pacific is of the opinion that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to ocean pollution. A report from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea should clarify the question. Climate lawsuits have also been filed in the USA, Brazil and Sweden. And in Germany, several lawsuits against car manufacturers have recently failed.
Is climate protection a human right?
The rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) were eagerly awaited. The lawyers should decide there for the first time whether climate protection is a human right. What’s special about the cases: “The ECHR has already dealt with environmental emissions – noise or air pollution – but never with a country’s CO2 emissions,” said international law expert Birgit Peters from the University of Trier to the German Press Agency.
How the negotiations would end was uncertain until the end. According to the environmental lawyer Johannes Reich from the University of Zurich, there were “signs that the court will use the climate seniors’ complaint as an opportunity to develop uniform principles for all three similar cases.”
Stricter climate protection requirements would have a signaling effect that all contracting states to the European Convention on Human Rights would have to follow. However, concrete policy recommendations for individual states cannot be expected.
Sources: , , , , , with material from DPA
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
