Switzerland faulted in landmark climate ruling
European court ties decision to human rights law
LONDON — Europe’s top human rights court said Tuesday that the Swiss government had violated its citizens’ rights by not doing enough to stop climate change, a landmark ruling that experts said could bolster 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 target in reducing carbon emissions and must act to address that shortcoming.
The women, 64 and older, said their health was at risk during heat waves related to global warming. They argued that the Swiss government, by not doing enough to mitigate against global warming, had violated their rights.
It is the latest decision in a broader wave of climate-related lawsuits that aim to push governments to act against global warming, and countries’ domestic courts have handled similar cases. But experts said the ruling, which obligated a government to meet its climate targets under human rights law, was remarkable.
“It is the first time that an international court has affirmed clearly that a climate crisis is a human rights crisis,” said Joie Chowdhury, a senior lawyer with the Center for International Environmental Law, an international group that voiced its support for KlimaSeniorinnen’s case.
Although the decision is legally binding, experts say that states are ultimately responsible for complying.
With many other countries failing to meet their climate targets, the ruling could also encourage more members of the public to sue, experts said.
“I expect we’re going to see a rash of lawsuits in other European countries, because most of them have done the same thing,” said Michael Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York. “They have failed to meet their climate goals, and failed to set climate targets that are adequate.”
The European ruling, Gerrard said, was unlikely to affect court decisions in the United States, where states, cities, and counties are suing fossil fuel companies over the damages caused by climate change and young people are filing lawsuits over what they say is a failure by the state and federal governments to protect them from the effects of global warming.
But, Gerrard said, “the idea that climate change impaired fundamental rights resonated throughout the cases.”
The court’s ruling Tuesday covered three cases in which members of the public argued that their governments, by not doing enough to mitigate against climate change, were violating the European Convention on Human Rights. It rejected as inadmissible two of the cases, which were brought by the former mayor of a coastal town in France and a group of young people in Portugal.
With heat waves sweeping 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.
Four of the women said they had heart and respiratory diseases 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, lightheadedness, and other symptoms because of the extreme heat.
Under its climate commitments, Switzerland had vowed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. But the ruling said that between 2013 and 2020, Switzerland had reduced its emissions levels only around 11 percent. In addition, it said, the country had failed to use tools that could quantify its efforts to limit emissions, such as a carbon budget.
By not acting “in good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner,” the ruling said, the Swiss government had failed to protect its citizens’ rights.