Swiss Failed Citizens on Climate, Human Rights Court Says

(Bloomberg) — Switzerland failed to protect its citizens from the ravages of climate change, the European Court of Human Rights said in a landmark ruling likely to have ramifications across the continent.

In a first-of-its-kind case, brought by four women and a Swiss senior-citizens’ association, the Strasbourg, France-based court ruled on Tuesday by a margin of 16 to one that the “Swiss Confederation had failed to comply with its duties” concerning climate change and so violated their right to respect for private and family life. 

“There had been critical gaps in the process of putting in place the relevant domestic regulatory framework, including a failure by the Swiss authorities to quantify, through a carbon budget or otherwise, national greenhouse gas emissions limitations,” the court said. 

A string of summer heat waves over the past decade have shattered records and sent temperatures surging across Europe, melting glaciers in Switzerland and triggering forest fires across Greece, Spain and Portugal. At the same time other parts of the continent have seen unusually heavy flooding and other extreme weather, also linked in part to climate change.  

This decision is “hugely important for government accountability and government climate action because it affirms that climate change is a human rights crisis, and that climate action is a legal duty,” Lucy Maxwell, the co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, said in an interview. 

“What’s really powerful is that the court has gone to the next level of detail and said what that means is emissions reductions targets that are informed by science, and in this case of the Swiss government, you have failed to do that.”

Climate litigation has become a crucial part of the toolkit to force companies and governments to account over their climate promises and to boost action to slow global warming — with varying degrees of success. 

Shell Plc is currently fighting one of the most significant climate cases currently running in Europe, after it lost a case in The Hague ordering it to slash its greenhouse gases faster than originally planned.

Government ‘Inaction’

Switzerland’s center-left Social Democrats issued a statement calling the decision a “blow” to the government and “its inaction on climate.” 

The Swiss Environment Ministry declined to comment and the Ministry of Justice didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. 

The ruling was, however only a partial victory as it also ruled that the four Swiss women didn’t fulfill the victim-status criteria and declared their complaints inadmissible. Two other claims brought by a Frenchman and a group of youths in Portugal were rejected as inadmissible because the man no longer lived in France, and the Portuguese youths hadn’t yet pursued any domestic legal avenues for appeal. 

This case has assumed outsized importance because decisions by the court are binding across all 46 member states of the Council of Europe, and because it transcends decisions reached to date by European nations’ individual top courts. 

In late 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the Netherlands must bolster its emissions targets. In 2021, the German Constitutional Court ruled that shifting climate change measures to far into the future disproportionately shifting the burden onto young people.  

“This is also a European first for climate litigation,” according to Vesselina Newman, a human rights lawyer with the NGO ClientEarth.

The Council of Europe’s members “now have a clear legal duty to ensure their climate action is sufficient to protect human rights, and judges across Europe will have to apply these new principles to the growing number of climate cases before them,” she said.

–With assistance from Bastian Benrath.

(Updates with climate litigation background from the seventh paragraph)

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