STRASBOURG, France (CN) — The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday will rule on a group of environmental cases that could force countries across the continent to do more to combat climate change.
Two thousand older Swiss women, six Portuguese young people and one former mayor in France have all filed complaints with the Strasbourg-based court, arguing their human rights have been violated by the failure of their governments to reverse course on a warming planet.
“I have been affected by the climate crisis getting worse, much worse,” Sofia Oliveira, a Portuguese 19-year-old, told reporters ahead of the decision. “In Portugal, the heat waves have become much longer and hotter. The climate crisis and the fact that governments are failing to protect our futures causes me a lot of anxiety.”
Oliveira was just 12 years old when the legal proceedings began.
Pia Hollendstein, a board member of the Senior Women for Climate Protection, told CNS after hearings more than a year ago that her generation created many of the problems of climate change and she feels a responsibility to fix it.
“This is too important to not fight,” the 73-year-old said.
On Tuesday, the court will issue a decision in their cases as well as one from Damien Carême, former mayor of the small French town of Grande-Synthe, which he says is especially susceptible to rising sea levels.
“The attention is huge, the expectations are huge but the fear is also huge,” Corina Heri, a researcher in environmental law at the University of Zurich, told CNS in an interview. While decisions against one country aren’t binding on all 46-member Council of Europe member states, they do set a precedent that national courts are obliged to follow.
Even still, the European Convention of Human Rights, which created the court in 1959, does not explicitly provide protections for the environment. Lawyers in the three cases argue insufficient action to combat rising temperatures violates the civil and political rights of Europeans.
“Climate change could negate all rights,” Jessica Simor of London-based Matrix Chambers told the court's 17-judge panel during hearings in the Swiss case.
In all three cases, plaintiffs have asked the court to force countries to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. The United Nations agreement, signed by 195 countries, aims to keep the increase in global temperature to below 2°C or 3.6°F by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The complaints face major legal hurdles. Lawyers for the Portuguese youths, who are backed by the British human rights organization Global Action Legal Network, bypassed the national court system and filed their complaint directly with the court. Typically, however, parties must exhaust all domestic legal avenues before going to Strasbourg.
That complaint has also been filed against a record-breaking 31 other countries, with lawyers arguing that climate change is a global issue. However, judges have been historically reticent to find fault with countries not directly involved in a dispute. “This would revolutionize the extraterroritial jurisdiction of the court,” Heri said.
In the case brought by the Swiss women, the Swiss government has argued the group is unlikely to see the biggest impacts of climate change because of their age. The average member is 73 years old, and at least one woman involved in the original case has already died. As yet another obstacle, the human rights convention focuses on the rights of individuals and doesn’t have a mechanism for group action in the treaty.
The Strasbourg cases are just the latest legal battles to be waged over climate change. All of them cite a decision from the Supreme Court of the Netherlands as evidence that courts are moving towards holding governments accountable.
In 2019, that court ruled that the Dutch government must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by the end of 2020, based on a 1999 benchmark. That case was brought by the climate-action group Urgenda Foundation on behalf of 900 Dutch citizens. Similar cases have now also succeeded in Germany and Belgium.
Last year, 132 countries signed on to a request from the United Nations General Assembly, seeking an advisory opinion from the United Nation's highest court, The International Court of Justice, on climate change. While not binding, such opinions carry substantial legal weight.
In separate proceedings before the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea last September, lawyers for the Commission of Small Island States asked the U.N. court to clarify what actions countries must take to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
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