Europe's top rights court ruled on Tuesday that Switzerland is not doing enough to tackle climate change, in its first such ruling against a state on the subject.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued its decision after a Swiss association of older women concerned about the consequences of global warming argued that the Swiss authorities were not taking enough action to mitigate climate change.
It found that the Swiss state had violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the "right to respect for private and family life", according to the judgement published by the ECtHR.
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The court however threw out two other cases also concerning government policies on climate change on procedural grounds.
It dismissed a petition from six Portuguese people, aged 12 to 24, against 32 states including their own as the case had not exhausted all remedies at the national level.
In a third case, the court rejected a claim from a former French mayor that the inaction of the French state posed the risk of his town being submerged under the North Sea.
The court found that he was not a victim in the case as he had moved to Brussels.
Case by case:
The cases before the 17-judge ECtHR panel join a growing trend of communities bringing climate lawsuits against governments with arguments resting on human rights law.
In the winning case of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz vs Switzerland, more than 2,000 elderly Swiss women argue that their government's "woefully inadequate" efforts to fight the heating of the planet put them at risk of dying during heatwaves. They seek a ruling that could force Bern to cut fossil fuel emissions much faster than planned.
The unsuccesful case brought by Duarte Agostinho and five other young Portuguese accuse the 32 countries that are Europe's leading emitters of greenhouse gases of failing to avert catastrophic global warming, which they say threatens their right to life, saying that "heatwaves, wildfires, and wildfire smoke which they say impact their lives, well-being, mental health and their homes."
They did not ask for financial compensation, but for governments to drastically cut emissions.
In the final case, which was rejected, Damien Carême, former mayor of the French commune of Grande-Synthe and now a member of the European Parliament for the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance challenged Paris's refusal to take more ambitious measures to curtail climate change.
All three cases were heard by the ECtHR's top bench, the Grand Chamber, in 2023.
Some of the governments argued the cases are inadmissible. Switzerland has said it is not the ECtHR's job to be "supreme court" on environmental matters or to enforce climate treaties.
Climate litigation expands
The verdict in favour of the Swiss claimants sets a precedent for the 46 signatories of the European Human Rights Convention.
Countries may now need to update their plans for reining in climate-warming emissions in the near term. Failure to comply could result in further national litigation, and courts could issue financial penalties.
The rulings, which cannot be appealed, are also likely to serve as a guide for the fast-growing field of climate litigation.
In the last five years, the number of climate-related court cases filed around the world has more than doubled, according to a 2023 report by the U.N. Environment Programme and New York's Columbia University.
"It's not like tort law that has hundreds of years of precedent," said Ruth Delbaere, legal campaigns director at global civic movement Avaaz. "This is kind of new, and so judges and courts are looking at each other."
Three other international tribunals — the International Court of Justice, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea — are currently writing advisory opinions on states' obligations on climate change.
"This ruling will almost certainly have a ripple effect across the world, not just Europe but everywhere," Delbaere said.
(With agencies)
