The European Court of Human Rights will hear an \u201cunprecedented\u201d lawsuit on Wednesday, brought by six young people against 32 European countries accusing them of failing to tackle the human-caused climate crisis. <\/p>\n
The claimants, between ages 11 and 24 and all from Portugal, will argue that they are on the frontlines of climate change and ask the court to force these countries to rapidly accelerate climate action. <\/p>\n
It is the first climate case to be filed with the European Court of Human Rights and is the largest of a total of three climate lawsuits the court is hearing. <\/p>\n
The stakes are high. A win would force countries to rapidly scale up their climate ambitions and would also offer a huge boost to the chances of other climate lawsuits around the world \u2013 especially those arguing that countries have human rights obligations to protect people from the climate crisis. <\/p>\n
If the court rules against the claimants, however, it could prove damaging for other climate claims. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is truly a David and Goliath case, that\u2019s unprecedented in its scale (and) its potential impacts,\u201d said Gear\u00f3id \u00d3 Cuinn, the director of Global Legal Action Network, or GLAN, which has supported the claimants\u2019 case. <\/p>\n
The journey to Wednesday\u2019s hearing began six years ago. \u201cEverything started in 2017 with the fires,\u201d said Catarina Mota, one of the claimants. <\/p>\n
The disaster catalyzed the lawsuit. Mota started talking to her friend and now fellow claimant, Cl\u00e1udia Duarte Agostinho, and with the assistance of GLAN, they gathered four more claimants, all of whom were affected by the 2017 fires. <\/p>\n
While the claim was triggered by the fires, climate change continues to affect their lives, the group argues, particularly the fierce heat waves that Portugal regularly experiences. They say these periods make it hard to go outside, to concentrate on schoolwork, to sleep and for some even to breathe, in addition to the impacts on their mental health. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes us worried about our future. How could we not be scared?\u201d said 15-year-old claimant Andr\u00e9 dos Santos Oliviera. <\/p>\n
The lawsuit, which was filed in 2020 and has relied heavily on crowdfunding, was fast-tracked by the European Court of Human Rights due to the urgency of the issue and the large number of defendants. <\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the claimants will argue that a failure to tackle the accelerating climate crisis is breaching their human rights, including their rights to life and family life, to freedom from inhuman treatment and to freedom from discrimination on the basis of age. <\/p>\n
They are asking the court to rule that countries fueling the climate crisis have obligations to protect not only their own citizens but also those outside their borders. <\/p>\n
Their demand is that the 32 countries, which include the 27 European Union countries plus Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom, drastically cut their planet-heating pollution and also force companies headquartered within their borders to cut emissions across their whole supply chains. <\/p>\n
For their part, the countries being sued have claimed in written submissions that none of the claimants has established they have suffered serious harm as a result of climate change. <\/p>\n
The government in Greece \u2013 a country which has just experienced a deadly summer of heat, fire and storms \u2013 said in its response: \u201cThe effects of climate change as recorded so far do not seem to directly affect human life or human health.\u201d <\/p>\n
The lawsuit could go one of several ways. <\/p>\n
The court could dismiss the claim on procedural grounds or decide that it doesn\u2019t have the jurisdiction to hear it. <\/p>\n
If it passes procedural hurdles, the court could rule that states do not have human rights obligations when it comes to climate change. \u201cThat could be very damaging to other similar cases,\u201d said Michael B. Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. <\/p>\n
The lawsuit is the largest of three claims before the court, all of which concern countries\u2019 obligations towards their citizens when it comes to climate change. <\/p>\n
The other two were heard by the court in March. One was brought by more than 2,000 older Swiss women, who claimed that climate change-fueled heat waves undermined their health and quality of life, and the other by a French mayor, who claimed France\u2019s failure to act on climate change breached his human rights. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear if the courts will make a ruling on all the claims together but the time frame between the hearing and the judgment is typically nine to 18 months, said Gerry Liston, senior lawyer at GLAN. <\/p>\n
As extreme weather worsens, climate litigation is proving to be an increasingly popular tool to try to force climate action, especially as the world\u2019s nations have not done enough to cut pollution and avert catastrophic levels of warming. <\/p>\n
Even if current climate policies are met, the world is still on track for more than 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The planet has already warmed around 1.2 degrees, and the impacts are clear. This year alone has seen record-breaking heat waves, unprecedented wildfires and catastrophic floods. <\/p>\n
Countries are currently doing the bare minimum, said Liston from GLAN, and if every nation does that, \u201cwe are just going to keep going on this totally catastrophic trajectory.\u201d <\/p>\n
That\u2019s why people have been turning to the courts. There are more than 2,400 climate lawsuits globally, according to the Sabin Center, with more added every week. <\/p>\n
Continued advocacy and climate conferences \u2013 such as the upcoming United Nations COP28 summit in Dubai \u2013 are also vital, she added. <\/p>\n
For the Portuguese claimants, it will be an anxious wait for the court\u2019s judgment. Even if the claim doesn\u2019t go their way, Mota said, at least it will have got people to sit up and pay attention. <\/p>\n
Still, she added, \u201cwe long for a positive outcome.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
The European Court of Human Rights will hear an \u201cunprecedented\u201d lawsuit on Wednesday, brought by six young people against 32 European countries accusing them of failing to tackle the human-caused climate crisis. The claimants, between ages 11 and 24 and all from Portugal, will argue that they are on the frontlines of climate change and <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9243","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}