Climate action is a human right

Many climate journalists did their best to express their own wonder at, and the importance of what happened in Strasbourg on 9 April. Let’s see how they managed to. As Le Monde reported, three cases were brought to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by European citizens accusing countries of not doing enough to prevent climate change.

The judges rejected two of them, yet siding with one filed by the Swiss association of Elders for Climate Protection, made of 2,500 women aged 73 years on average, and four of its members, who complained about the "failings of the Swiss authorities" in terms of climate protection that could "seriously harm" their health. They are particularly concerned about the effects of heatwaves on their daily lives and wellbeing. The court ordered the Swiss state to pay the association €80,000 within three months.

It was a win against some of the worst aspects of our societies: climate inaction of course, but also ageism, and sexism.

“We based ourselves on the European Convention on Human rights”, says Swiss judge Andreas Zünd, interviewed by Le Temps. Both the right to life and the right to private life (which includes physical well-being) were used to establish a link with climate change, Zünd adds. "Global warming will have a major impact on people's wellbeing and could even cause their death.”

For Zünd, the judgement must also be considered in a pan-European context. “The ruling does not simply refer to Switzerland,” he said. “The means must be defined via democratic debate,” he added, noting that the Court does not intervene in the political process. “Climate change represents a new challenge, because the damage does not occur immediately.”

Vincent Lucchese on Reporterre argues that Switzerland’s condemnation is a “bolt of thunder”. The scientific reality of climate risk has been officially recognised by law.

Justine Guitton-Boussion and Jeanne Fourneau, also on Reporterre, looked at another case analysed on 9 April: the one of Damien Carême, MEP and former mayor of Grande-Synthe (a French city threatened by rising sea levels), who became the first French person to accuse the government of climate inaction. “[This] is threatening my life, the life of my children and my grand-children,” he said.

Carême lost his case, as did the young Portuguese who sued even 32 countries for the same reasons. However, “this doesn’t end here”, the six youths told Rita Siza and Aline Flor, who followed the sentences for Público. “We didn’t tear down the wall, but we opened a big crack,” said one of the six campaigners, Catarina Mota. “All governments in Europe must act in accordance with this decision immediately, and now we need people from all over Europe to come together to ensure that their countries do this.”  Público and in particular Patrícia Carvalho, Rui Gaudêncio and Vera Moutinho have been covering the story since 2020, since the campaigners were only between 8 and 21 years old, so we should probably take these words seriously. 

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On ENDS, Conor McGlone writes that citizens are now expected to challenge EU climate policies after this landmark ruling. “EU countries could now be asked by their citizens to review and if necessary strengthen their climate policies based on principles from the European Court of Human Rights.” It really is an epochal success, for the Swiss old women and – ipso facto – for all.

We need victories like this because, on other news, legal battles are going in the opposite direction, with criminalisation being used to silence climate activists. And yet, justice should be on their side: we have "two years to save the world” was the chilling preamble to the speech delivered recently by Climate Change Executive Secretary, Simon Stiell.

Ecocide in Ukraine

The London Ukrainian Review examines Russia’s war on nature in Ukraine and its global repercussions. “In the essay Vertical Occupation, Svitlana Matviyenko probes the multidimensional character of the environmental damage Russia inflicts upon Ukraine”, summarises the Review. “In a conversation with environmental policy analyst Anna Ackermann, the co-founder of Stop Ecocide, Jojo Mehta, explores how the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has galvanised legal discussion”. Together they discuss the significance of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which could be considered an act of ecocide. In this sense, the environmental disaster in Ukraine could be used to include this definition in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The war vocabulary is in Ferdinando Cotugno’s piece for Domani, too. In 2026 a gasification plant should move off the coast of Vado Ligure and Savona (North-West of Italy), but there are environmental and safety doubts. 

It’s a trend: following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the energy security argument was used by the European Commission as a way to wean the EU off Russian gas and fossil fuels in general. However, many fossil fuel companies have used it as a way to justify the purchase of gas from other countries and continents, or the installation of new plants. Or to move towards sources presented as ‘green’ when they rarely are.

Several countries neighbouring the EU, such as Morocco and Tunisia, plan to export hydrogen to meet European demand, threatening to increase pressure on their resources and competition between them, write Achref Chibani, Ghassan El Karmouni and Weilian Zhu in Alternatives Economiques.

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More picks

If you are into podcasts, Cotugno’s column Areale just made it to Spotify. In the second episode, he talks about Stiell’s speech and gloom and doom, and what to do with these feelings instead.

Not to go shopping, perhaps. For Romania Insider, Radu Dumitrescu reports on an investigation by Greenpeace, showing that furniture manufacturers producing for IKEA are sourcing wood from some of Europe’s last remaining old-growth forests in the Romanian Carpathians, including in Natura 2000 protected areas.

This is it for this month, keep the attention high, I’ll leave you with the most important word: ‘protect’.

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