Europe’s top human rights court said on Tuesday that the Swiss government violated the human rights of its citizens by not doing enough to stop climate change, a landmark ruling that experts say could boost activists hoping to use human rights law to hold governments to account.
In the case, which was brought by a group called KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, said Switzerland had failed to meet its carbon reduction target and must act to deal with it. lack of.
The women, aged 64 and over, said their health was at risk during heatwaves linked to global warming. They argued that the Swiss government, by not doing enough to mitigate global warming, had violated their rights.
It is the latest ruling in a wider wave of climate-related lawsuits aimed at pushing governments to act against global warming, and countries’ domestic courts have handled similar cases. But experts said it was the first step by an international court to establish that governments were legally bound to meet their climate targets under human rights law.
“This is the first time that an international court has clearly confirmed that a climate crisis is a human rights crisis,” said Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, an international group that has expressed its support for KlimaSeniorinnen’s case.
Although the ruling is legally binding, experts say states are ultimately responsible for compliance.
Annalisa Savaresi, a professor of environmental law at the University of Eastern Finland, said she expects the country to heed the court’s decision. “Just because Switzerland is Switzerland: It’s a rule of law, it’s not a rogue state,” he said. “They want to be seen as doing the right thing.”
With many other countries failing to meet their climate goals, the ruling could also encourage more members of the public to sue, experts say.
“I expect we’ll see a wave of lawsuits in other European countries because most of them have done the same thing,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York. “They have failed to meet their climate targets and they have failed to set adequate climate targets.”
The European ruling, Mr. Gerrard said, is unlikely to affect court rulings in the United States, where states, cities and counties are suing fossil fuel companies over climate change damage and young people are suing for what they say is failure. of state and federal governments to protect them from the effects of global warming.
But, Mr Gerrard said, “the idea that climate change harms fundamental rights resonated across the board”.
The court’s ruling on Tuesday covered three cases in which members of the public argued that their governments, by not doing enough to mitigate climate change, were violating the European Convention on Human Rights. It dismissed as inadmissible two of the cases brought by the former mayor of a coastal town in France and a group of youths in Portugal.
With heat waves sweeping through Switzerland in recent summers, the litigants, who worked on the lawsuit for nearly a decade with Greenpeace and a team of lawyers, pointed to research showing that older women are particularly vulnerable to heat-related illnesses. heat.
Four of the women said they had heart and respiratory conditions that put them at risk of death on very hot days. Many others in the group, who live across Switzerland, said they struggled with fatigue, dizziness and other symptoms due to the extreme heat.
As part of its climate commitments, Switzerland had pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. However, the decision said that between 2013 and 2020, Switzerland had reduced its emission levels by only about 11%. In addition, he said, the country failed to use tools that could quantify its efforts to curb emissions, such as carbon budgeting.
By failing to act “timely and in an appropriate and consistent manner,” the ruling said, the Swiss government failed to protect the rights of its citizens.
The court ordered Switzerland to take measures to address these deficiencies and to pay KlimaSeniorinnen 80,000 euros, about $87,000, to cover their costs and expenses.
The Swiss government had argued that human rights law did not apply to climate change and that tackling it should be a political process. However, Switzerland’s federal justice office, which represents the country at the European court, said in a statement on Tuesday that Swiss authorities would analyze the decision and consider what measures the country should take.
The court said that given the complexity of the issues involved, the Swiss government was best placed to decide how to proceed. A committee of government representatives for the court’s member states will oversee Switzerland’s adoption of measures to address the ruling.
Rosmarie Wydler-Wälti, co-president of KlimaSeniorinnen, called the decision “a victory for all generations” in a statement on Tuesday.
A second case the court considered centered on a complaint about Grande-Synthe, a French town on the English Channel facing an increased risk of flooding due to climate change. Damien Carême, who was mayor of the city from 2001 to 2019, argued in the lawsuit that France had endangered Grande-Synthe by taking insufficient measures to prevent global warming.
The court ruled that his case was inadmissible, however, because Mr. Carême, who is now a member of the European Parliament, no longer lives in France and therefore no longer has a legal relationship with the city.
The court also ruled inadmissible a lawsuit by six Portuguese youths against 33 countries that signed the Paris climate agreement, including Portugal, for failing to comply with their commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions. The applicants argued that the current and future impacts of climate change — including heat waves, wildfires and smoke from those flames — affected their lives, well-being and mental health.
The court ruled that the applicants had not exhausted all legal options in Portugal and that filing a complaint against the other 32 countries would involve an “unlimited extension” of states’ jurisdiction.
David Gelles contributed reporting from New York.
