Switzerland isn’t exactly known for warm weather. But recent summer heat waves in the Alpine nation have become much more extreme, leading to hundreds of deaths – and a major lawsuit, brought by a group of more than 1,800 elderly Swiss women against the Swiss government, arguing that their country’s inadequate climate change response amounts to a violation of their human rights.
“They closely follow [the] weather forecast and organise their life around it. They often stay at home with blinded windows … They resign from outdoor activities,” the group’s lawyers wrote in a 2020 petition. “All of this results in (increased) loneliness, sadness and anxiety.” And above all, they added, an increased risk of premature death: Research has shown that older women are more likely to die from heat-related illness than any other demographic group.
On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights sided with the women, handing down a historic decision that experts expect to reverberate around the world.
“It’s a big deal,” says Jarryd Page, an attorney at the Environmental Law Institute, a nonpartisan research, publishing and education center. “It’s going to take time to sort out or understand the full impact, but it does mean that countries are likely to really start reviewing what they’re doing on climate change. What commitments are they making? Are they strong enough? Are they living up to those commitments?”
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The European court’s decision came after the Swiss women, known as KlimaSeniorinnen, had already exhausted legal remedies in their own country. The group, most of whom are over 70 and some of whom suffer from asthma, heart disease and other ailments that are exacerbated by heat, formed in 2016 with the aim of improving Swiss climate policies, especially for future generations. But Swiss regional and national courts rejected their claims, prompting the group to file its petition with the France-based European Court of Human Rights in 2020.
The European court’s favorable ruling is binding and orders Switzerland to remedy its poor response to the climate crisis – the country has failed on its promise to reduce its 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020, the court noted, and has also failed to adequately consider its carbon tracking strategies – as well as pay 80,000 euros (about $87,000) to cover the group’s expenses.
While international courts have previously issued climate-related rulings, legal experts say the decision is the first of its kind: a verdict that explicitly ties government inaction on climate change to human rights.
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“In this case, it’s not that Switzerland did something bad. It’s that they didn’t do something good,” says Camille Pannu, the director of the Environmental and Climate Justice Clinic at Columbia Law School. “They didn’t take action to address climate change, and because of their inaction the group that brought the lawsuit [suffered] human rights abuses.”
The biggest impact, naturally, will be felt in Europe, where 46 nations recognize the jurisdiction of the court. (The court’s reach is wider than that of the European Union, which now counts 27 member states, and includes all states that touch the continent except Russia, Belarus and the Vatican.)
Along with Switzerland itself, where authorities have said they’ll assess the judgment and implement policy changes, Pannu notes that Portugal and France – two countries whose national laws include strong environmental rights frameworks – might be particularly likely to make their own climate policy changes as a kind of preemptive effort at compliance. The optics of this particular case could also help spur government action.
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“No one wants to be someone who’s been found to have abused the human rights of older people,” Pannu says.
The ruling could also impact the dozens of additional climate-related suits ongoing around Europe, including notable cases in Germany and France where courts have ruled that governments must take further climate action but officials have yet to actually implement the changes, says Michael Gerrard, the director of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
The KlimaSeniorinnen decision, he says, could lead to beefier court orders on those cases. It’s also likely to kick off a new wave of lawsuits.
“It’s a very strong precedent that is now going to be cited in all of the European climate litigation,” Gerrard says, “and in much of the litigation elsewhere in the world.”
That includes climate change-related suits underway in other international courts, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
But national courts around the world are also seeing a flood of climate cases – the Sabin Center’s tracker counts 146 climate change suits against governments specifically related to human rights, including cases brought in the courts of Brazil, South Korea and Guyana.
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“And I’m sure this decision will be looked at closely in those cases,” Gerrard says, “because the same underlying principles apply everywhere – the idea that climate change poses a threat to human health and welfare.”
Other national governments could also be buoyed by the court’s ruling to act on their own. Pannu points to Argentina and the Philippines, where some politicians have been staking claims as climate defenders.
But the influence of the European decision won’t land everywhere, including in the halls of power of the world’s biggest polluters. China and Russia are likely to ignore the order. In the U.S., where hundreds of climate-related cases are also ongoing in federal and state courts – far more than anywhere else in the world – experts say the decision may add political momentum but is unlikely to actually affect rulings.
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