Switzerland faces landmark climate-human rights ruling
swissinfo.ch
swissinfo.ch
And these people are from the country on earth where the population has the greatest control over their government. Switzerland isn't some rogue state, the population has legal means to force the government to do essentially whatever they want. So the human rights violation is essentially being committed by the population themselves.
If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
It really must be dismaying to see how little anyone actually cares about the environment on a global challenge, for someone who cares about the environment. Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.
Because it’s not about solving a serious challenge facing humanity — it’s about the social credit of virtue signaling:
- Establishing consensus and working with stakeholders would be hard.
- Whining to an unelected, transnational body to force your “benevolence” on your nation is easy.
If people are concerned about the unrest in Europe (farmer protests; collapse of faith in institutions; rise of populists), or more broadly about delivering results on issues challenging humanity, this is counterproductive.
The government is bound by laws, constitutional principles, and institutional mechanisms that prevent the majority from infringing on the rights of minorities or violating international obligations. Of course the population can't force the goverment "to do whatever they want" and this is not how any of it works.
>Which may or may not even effect the people who are suing at all.
It's evident that the lawsuit does affect them since they reside in Switzerland and are therefore only able to hold Switzerland accountable. If they were to reside in Germany, France, or any other country, they would have the freedom to pursue legal action against those respective nations. This aspect was also the reason for the dismissal of the Portuguese case; the plaintiffs were suing countries other than Portugal.
>You have a court, which was created in an attempt to give legal options to victims of crimes committed by nation state and which could not be heard elsewhere.
It is common practice for decisions concerning human rights abuses by the Swiss Supreme Court to be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which serves as the ultimate authority in such matters.
>It really must be dismaying to see how little anyone actually cares about the environment on a global challenge, for someone who cares about the environment. Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.
They did what they could and took responsibility for what they could. Which is a lot more than other people do.
>If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
To benchmark against India or China regarding pollution sets the standard at its lowest. If we continue this pattern, finger-pointing will never stop. It's important that we raise our standards and lead by example.
Yes, but people have the right to sue the population itself. Usually the legal system comes with ranks, and if a higher rank rule contradicts a lower rank rule, the higher rank rule prevails. Usually the constitution is at the top, then come international treatises, laws, then contracts. So if a law has been voted by the people and it contradicts the constitution or a treaty that has been signed, people can complain.
Imagine, say in the US, a state decides to pass a law reinstating slavery, and for some reason, there is a majority of supporters (because the would be slaves are a minority), and the law passes. Anyone can can then complain and have the law repealed even if it was accepted by the majority, because it contradicts the constitution. The constitution can be changed too, but the requirements are much more stringent than a simple majority.
Well, no. Switzerland is not an anarchic commune, it's a representational democracy, just one that makes heavy use of referendums. But just like elections, referendums don't establish consent, they establish majority support. "The population" isn't a cohesive entity, even less so than "the government". If the government is failing to take action and there is no sufficient majority to "force it", that's not "the population" doing it, that's just the majority of the population not intervening (and that doesn't even get into the difference between "the population" and "all eligible voters").
By definition, the ECHR court is the right place to take this if the government refuses to take action and there is no democratic majority for this. If you think the ECHR only exists for "rogue states" that flay their own population in public or turn ethnic minorities into lampshades, that should be a learning opportunity for you to read up on human rights and the ECHR specifically.
> If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
This is literally a textbook example of whataboutism but the answer is yes, they're all bad and there are certainly worse offenders than Switzerland.
But unlike Switzerland, neither China nor India are signatories to the ECHR so they're irrelevant to this case.
Switzerland is a direct democracy, not just a representative (i.e. indirect) democracy. In the present case the ECHR is obviously misused with very dubious arguments. The fact that the ECHR does not put a stop to such abuse will not exactly improve its acceptance among the Swiss voters.
We just also have votations on a lot of things.
Trotzdem nennt man das "direkte Demokratie". Wir hatten noch so etwas wie "Staatskunde" in der Schule. Die Jungen haben das heute anscheinend nicht mehr. Der Punkt ist, dass das Volk per Initiative etc. bei Bedarf eingreifen kann, also nicht nur dem Parlament aus der Ferne zusehen darf. Siehe auch https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/de/home/politik-ge....
Of course your "Staatskunde" lesson in school may have handwaved that distinction because the former by definition is stateless and the purpose is to distinguish between the Swiss governance model and other representative democracies, not doing a deep dive on all forms of governance.
We had "political science" lessons in school and they were largely about the structure of our own system (e.g. one exam literally involved adjusting the federal budget), maybe with some excursions to contrast it with e.g. the US but I don't think we ever learned about delegative democracy, let alone anarchist, minarchist or Marxist theories. Because it was a public school in Germany, the German model of the "social market economy" was never challenged and implied to be the best possible system because it is written into our constitution.
Saying a representative democracy that makes use of instruments for direct democracy is direct democracy is a bit like saying a social market economy (i.e. a market economy with a state-provided, limited, tax-funded social welfare system) is socialism. One may have political motivations to label it as such (either to make it more or less appealing) but it muddies definitions by conflating "pars pro toto", i.e. a part and the whole.
I understand that Switzerland calls itself a direct democracy. I understand that many other representative democracies refer to the Swiss form of governance that way. I understand that this language may even have ended up in laws and legal interpretations, but that doesn't change that "direct democracy" means something very specific (i.e. literally everyone voting on every issue, often in the form of proxy voting or delegation) in political theory. I'm not saying Switzerland does not offer more voter participation than other representative democracies. It is a lot closer to direct democracy than any of its neighbors or fellow European democracies. But it's not a direct democracy.
Think of direct democracy like functional programming: there are plenty of programming languages that were originally conceived of as procedural or object-oriented or class-based that claim to support "functional programming" and some are actually very good at it but that does not make them functional programming languages in the same way as languages designed as functional programming languages from the start. Switzerland started out as a representative democracy and introduced and strengthened its participatory instruments over time to behave more like a direct democracy (check out the PDF at the end of the page you linked, it even uses the same narrative of Athens and the French revolution used by other representative democracies to explain their origins). That does not make it a direct democracy, it just makes it a representative democracy with exceptionally good participatory instruments.
It makes perfect sense for Switzerland to describe itself as a direct democracy when it wants to contrast itself with all the other representative democracies because those instruments borrowed from direct democracy set it apart. But that's like Ruby bragging about being a functional programming language by comparing itself to Python and Java because Haskell and Lisp are not part of the conversation.
These may all be interesting trains of thought, but they have little to do with the state treaties and processes at hand, which are based on agreed terminology (insofar as human language allows such a thing at all) and which are the reference for the assessment of the case at hand. If you are interested in the subject, you should study the works of established state theorists. Wikipedia is a rather dubious source for a scientific discussion of a topic.
Redefining it as a subset of representative democracy through the introduction of participatory processes makes sense when talking in a context where representative democracies are taken for granted but it is extremely unhelpful when talking in a broader scope where representative democracies are merely one of many categories of systems. There's a reason the PDF references the French Revolution rather than the Paris Commune and describes democracy merely in a (largely ahistorical TBH) European context informed by the Enlightenment era and limits the idea of decentralisation to the federalism of cantons rather than exploring it further: it's not about analysis, it's about creating a national mythology and a historical narrative that has the present system as an inevitable end state that can only be built upon but not fundamentally changed.
And all of this is really a red herring because the original argument was about whether the system Switzerland has makes it unnecessary to appeal to a super-national court in order to force a decision. And given that referendums and public initiatives still require a majority in order to pass the answer is clearly no.
Given that the claim is that the (in)action of the Swiss government accelerates/intensifies the climate catastrophe and that this effectively violates the human rights of a minority group (i.e. seniors are more likely to die from severe weather events like heatwaves) and that referendums have not helped change the (in)action of the government, a referendum is the wrong instrument as the question is not what the majority wants but whether a minority has their fundamental rights violated.
You can argue that the ECHR court was wrong to agree that this is a violation of the rights asserted by the ECHR. You can argue that Switzerland should leave the ECHR and replace it with a different human rights bill - and assuming you have the requisite legal status in Switzerland you can even attempt to force this question with a public initiative. You could also simply argue that they should have sued the Swiss government in a Swiss court of law first (I'm not sure how the Federal Supreme Court works but presumably the process would be a bit more involved) before taking this to an international level. But the ECHR court is ultimately the right addressee when arguing a signatory's violation of the ECHR, "direct" democracy or not.
You can disagree with the ECHR. Not every country is a signatory of the ECHR. Not every country is a signatory of the equivalent UN convention either - notably the US is also not a signatory to the UN convention on the rights of children and there are many people in signatory countries who don't seem to agree with it either. But as long as the Swiss government does not remove itself from the ECHR, it is subject to it. You can't have it both ways - or rather, you can and Switzerland does as it hasn't signed protocols 4 and 12 (pertaining free movement and discrimination respectively) and has only signed but not ratified protocol 1.
This is undemocratic nonsense. The ECHR has well defined concerns. Even the ECHR recognizes the separation of powers, and the court has clear jurisdiction in this system. It is not the court's task to expand the scope of the EHCR. At least that's how it was when I was studying law.
https://www.echr.coe.int/w/grand-chamber-rulings-in-the-clim...
"The Court found that Article 8 of the Convention encompasses a right to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on lives, health, well-being and quality of life. However, it held that the four individual applicants did not fulfil the victim-status criteria under Article 34 of the Convention and declared their complaints inadmissible. The applicant association, in contrast, had the right to bring a complaint. The Court held that there had been a violation of the right to respect for private and family life of the Convention and that there had been a violation of the right to access to the court. The Court found that the Swiss Confederation had failed to comply with its duties (“positive obligations”) under the Convention concerning climate change."
But I'm curious about the legal technicalities here (because IANAL): You can surely argue for a country having to better protect its own citizens through e.g. adaptations, but no matter how you look at it I don't think Swiss emissions can reasonably be viewed as a proximal cause of any substantial climate-related harm to Swiss citizens. Comparing consumption-based emissions from OWID [1] shows CH is responsible for 118.68 million / 37.15 billion ≈ 0.3% of global emissions, so even going net-zero instantly would hardly make a dent. Under this perspective, even the most ambitious climate policy we implement would hardly protect our citizens from adverse impacts by a meaningful amount?
Does anyone who understands human rights law better than me have thoughts on this?
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions
I’ve always argued that if we can’t make non carbon emitting sources cheaper than coal and gas (full load leveled cost) and dispatchable (batteries) we have no hope of cutting emissions and everything else is theater.
Right now it seems that burning fossil fuel is still the cheapest way to generate energy without any regulations, taxes, or subsidies. Yes that includes nuclear.
Anyway, there was an article here that also claimed 80% energy investments in the U.S. are renewables. Isn't this 4:1 ratio interesting? Doesn't this tell you that (despite the noise), both China and US are on a very similar path?
There is a big tragedy in the west - we have no understanding of other countries. Despite having millions of immigrants from those other countries.
Could we maybe interview some of them to find out what’s going on?
For example - we’ve been in Afghanistan for 20 years. Britain has thousands of refugees from Afghanistan.
When the time came to evacuate people from Afghanistan, the British team that was in charge of planning, selecting and prioritising evacuees had zero people from Afghanistan, zero people who’ve been to Afghanistan and zero knowledge of how things work there!
Report spells it out: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmdfen...
In case of Russia on climate change, it’s a laggard-follower of European technology and practices. Vodka is produced and bottled with Italian machinery, artillery for war in ukraine is still produced on German CNC machines, Russian tanks had French thermal scopes, and cool dudes drive a BMW.
When all European countries go renewable, after a few years lag, Russia will do the same. The cool dude will buy an electric BMW when all BMWs are electric, etc.
Given that Russia has massive resources and farmland locked away in permafrost, they have been dealt a good hand if climate change is not addressed. So they have no urgency to act, but they are not a malicious actor on this specific issue.
I have never been to China but recently I've been seeing reports on how China has actually leaped ahead in some areas like automation, electrification and environmentalism. I'm really not fan of their style of government but if a change is going to happen, it has to happen with Chine due to their insane population and industrial base. Therefore, it seems like China might be on the right track there.
China continues coal spree despite climate goals [2]
Two "progressive" outlets report on how China is approving new coal power projects at the equivalent of two plants every week. No matter how much you may want to root for China's right to grow its economy this does not seem like a "giant success" when seen through a "climate" lens.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/china-coal-pla...
But that still increases total emissions.
China has installed more renewables than the rest of the world combined. They will have zero emissions grid before US or even Western European countries like Britain. Most nuclear reactors in the world are being built in China as well.
What will we do when China produces all the world’s batteries, solar panels and electric cars? Will we slide into irrelevance?
Why am I asking, we already know what we will do! EU has moved to introduce tariffs on Chinese electric cars because they are too cheap! Our course of action is economically suicidal
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-06/eu-moves-...
We'll just be selling wealthy Chinese our real estate and tourist packages to visit our 500 year old buildings, because those will be the only profitable industries left in Europe.
Also, Switzerland has increased their consumption-based emissions by over 38% since 1990 while in the same time frame countries like France has reduced by 15%, Germany reduced by 30%, UK reduced by 23%, EU27 reduced by 20%.
I find this court ruling strange. Sure you could argue that Switzerland should have done more. But does its lack of action make Switzerland liable for the discomfort that these women are experiencing because of global climate change?
Yes, you can read the judge's ruling to see the reasoning of a legal expert.
Is "discomfort" really how you frame the scientific consensus that climate change cause harm, and disproportionately so to elderly people or just a factor of transdiction?
Naturally one can not make every country to be identical to every other. Geographical differences, population differences, cultural and historical differences all play a major role in defining what a country is and how that effects statistics around emissions. Per capita emissions in particular is very much influenced by things like historical wars and genocides, borders and maps, trade, agriculture, and much more. Per capital calculations are one of multiple mathematical data points where if we normalize and apply additional data points we can find some indication of possible places where savings in emissions might occur. It can not be applied universally to all countries as if all countries could be made equivalent.
Domestic _energy_ production is just a fraction of the emissions footprint: Switzerland _literally_ has a 236% per capita CO2 equivalent consumption-based emissions when including trade and it is slowly rising.
It is larger than France (36%)
It is larger than Germany (22%)
It is larger than UK (48%)
It is larger than Namibia (146%)
It is larger than USA (11%)
Since you brought up examples like Namibia, what would happen to emissions if Switzerland invaded Namibia and took over that country? Switzerland per capital emissions would drastically go down, but global emissions would obvious be unchanged.
If you lead on climate change, you export solutions to other countries - for example how china is exporting Solar panels. We could have been exporting power grid planning expertise, wind turbine tech, etc. unfortunately now that ship has sailed as China has invested billions and were chose to dither and delay. That’s the price of fucking about
A typical solar panel will save over 900kg of CO2 per year that results in a carbon payback period of ~ 1.6 years and expected life of 25 years
It is more important to produce huge quantity of panels for the future and than it is to ensure impossible standard of perfection today.
Sorry but Switzerland is hosting some of the largest coal mining and sale intermediaries in the world (Vitol, Glencore, etc), where a lot of wealth is made from fossil fuel mining and sales, even if it's not a direct consumer or producer, along with Nestle and other major Swiss conglomerates being directly responsible for environmental damage around the world.
Just like with banking Nazi gold and illicitly obtained wealth of criminal dictators and war profiteering, when it comes to the environment, Switzerland's hands are in no way clean, despite posturing as a small, cute, green, innocent country that supposedly has no impact on the global environment.
This court ruling seems quite perplexing then, doesn't it?
[0] https://www.v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/switzerland-votes-on-c...
Most people vote for parties whose plans don't match what they say they'll accomplish, such as lower taxes or whatever else they believe will be good for them. A greater percentage of naturalised immigrants than those with local heritage voting for the one party wanting to stop immigration and abolish religious freedoms, that sort of thing.
If someone has a better study on this, I'd be much interested, but that a court (in applying fundamental rights made up by people whose elected job it is to care for a country) disagrees with the average person on the street is not surprising to me
First of all, "Swiss voters" didn't reject the law, a majority of Swiss voters did. That may sound like semantics but it means the group that brought this case was likely not or not entirely part of the group that rejected the law.
Secondly, this assumes anyone rejecting the law in question disagrees with this case or the ruling. That seems highly questionable.
The law had some flaws but was generally expected to be affirmed by the referendum as it had a majority support in opinion polls before the referendum. It looks like there were some climate activists who opposed it for being insufficient and there were some who argued it did not adequately protect people who had to commute by car (which might explain why it was supported less outside the metropolitan centers). But the biggest factor seems to have been a public campaign backed by industries opposed to it, spreading what HN likes to refer to as "FUD".
She has some incredible audacity bringing this case.
In a just world she would be a defendant not a plaintiff.
Can citizens from every country bring similar cases to the court? Then they will have no option but to produce hundreds of mutually-contradictory rulings. I wonder if they have set an interesting precedent for themselves
Is there even a technology available that could show the impact on climate change were Switzerland's CO2 magically zero tomorrow?
Apparently not a single physicist or medical doctor on the board, but many politicians and lawyers.
EDIT: this is an easily verifiable fact, but apparently there are people here for whom even that is too much.
One should be able to expect that a board of an association that is committed to a cause should have at least a few people on it who have formal training in that cause and appropriate professional experience.
Otherwise, you could ask yourself with good reason why they can't find any experts to officially represent their cause.
Those folks can hire experts to interpret white papers if needed, but they aren't participating in science, they are consuming it.
(I don't need to be an excellent musician to advocate for the belief that Spotify doesn't equitably pay musicians. If I wanted to legislatively address that, I'd need lawyers and politicians, not musicians. And I could build a data driven case without many musicians at all.)
If you wanted to be taken seriously about “equitable pay for musicians”, then you’d absolutely need people who understand the economics and market dynamics of the music industry. Only having legal expertise makes it seem like you’re merely lobbying your personal feelings — not about a real problem.
> And I could build a data driven case without many musicians at all.
But not without data scientists, economists, and probably music industry insiders to provide data. And that’s not a job for lawyers and lobbyists; which was the original question.
If a cop is busting heads, you don't wait to elect a new sheriff, you bring a lawsuit to fix the acute problem. If a department is systematically harming a group, you can try to elect someone who will make this their project, or you can get an intervention to prevent further harm via the legal system.
Using the legal system to prevent acute harm is both correct and reasonable, even in a democracy.
Democracy is about the majority; and in Switzerland - in contrast to most other democracies - it's the majority of the real population, not just an elite class, and the people directly decide about real problems, not just who should represent them. And there are even provisions which assure that local concerns are sufficiently considered. You should inform yourself about this great political system.
> Using the legal system to prevent acute harm is both correct and reasonable
In the present case, it's clearly a misuse; it's a lobby organization with a lot of money that pro forma puts forward an association of old women so that with this sleight of hand the complaint is accepted by the court at all on a subject where the court has no jurisdiction at all. The aim is to undermine a democratically made decision against the will of the people, i.e. exactly the opposite of a democratic process.
It is in the nature of human beings that a few will always be dissatisfied, no matter how well off they are or what form of society is applied.
The sovereignty of the Swiss people is a compromise that came about on a voluntary basis through the coming together of people from different regions and languages. No one is forced to live in Switzerland, and yet a considerable part of the world seems to want to do so.
You might say, will they did eventually and recently fix that, but what systemic inequalities allowed that to last so long?
For what it's worth, I do think direct democracy is good, but I don't think direct democracy always solves the most urgent problems or ensures that nonmajority people can survive.
Let me be extra clear, Swiss voting system sounds pretty good. But it's not flawless. It can even be the best system in widespread use and not be flawless. The will of the majority can be wrong, and it needs to be acceptable to challenge it.
Here in the USA the will of the majority was to segregate schools and prevent Black kids from attending them. That's what the majority wanted. It was wrong, and the minority using the courts to overturn the will of the majority is correct. Waiting to convince a new generation to integrate would do irreparable harm.
Challenges to the majority viewpoint are crucial and healthy and normal in a democracy. Whether that majority is conservative or progressive, we need to test the results regularly.
The values and legal system of a democracy essentially reflect the will of the people, and fifty years ago people had a different attitude to these values than they do today. And we cannot expect each country to come to the same conclusions. The question is: do we know a better system than (direct) democracy to improve society in the long term? Likely not.
An ever-growing danger that is damaging society and democracy is the ever-increasing polarization and thus the reduction of pluralism of opinion and discussion culture, fuelled, for example, by lobby organizations that have very large financial resources at their disposal, or by the corruption of science through tendentious funding systems such as we have today. It is becoming increasingly difficult to form a sufficiently objective opinion on factual issues and to isolate the relevant facts from the many fake news and paid bogus experts. In Germany in the 1930s, for example, we saw how systematic misinformation and indoctrination can affect the will of voters. In relation to the present discussion, see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39995558.
women were not "people"? Were they asked? If not, why not?
I have questions. What is a "real" population?
The swiss direct democracy is about "the majority of the real population" ? So the intiatives are won with a majority of the population? >50% of the population? Is that true? I thought it's something like >50% of the valid votes.
> You should inform yourself about this great political system.
Please explain this great political system to me.
Might be the wrong term, thus in quotes; I wanted to express, that the voters can directly influence political decisions; in a representative democracy, in contrast, such decisions are reserved for a political elite (in the case of a representative democracy e.g. a parlament); the problem of the latter is, that this "elite" tends to live in their own world during their term of office.
> Please explain this great political system to me.
That would really go too far in a commentary, and there are also established sources that can explain this far better than I can. I'm also not used to writing about it in English. I recommend first of all the links mentioned in my other comments.
and the "elite" can influence voters through other means. That "masses" can be manipulated should be known.
Would I buy stock in a company that uses biochemistry products, but did not have a biochemist? Yes, of course.
And they obviously didn't convince Swiss voters, but made them angry instead and more sceptical towards European institutions.
See e.g. https://www.20min.ch/story/schweiz-verurteilt-klimaseniorinn... which includes a poll where 80% of currently ~15k people regard Swiss climate measures as sufficient and the interference of foreign judges as an impertinence.
The ECHR needs to be abolished and Switzerland needs to leave this court.
As per the article, they are arguing that seniors are particularly affected by climate change due to heat waves, and these are causing deaths.
The 2022 heatwaves had hundreds of deaths attributed to climate change in Switzerland: https://lenews.ch/2023/07/08/climate-change-behind-60-percen...
The issue is that Switzerland outlawed air conditioning for private homes (still allowed in shopping centres though!)
I know of a bunch of people who legally purchased and installed aircon in their homes.
Yeah you can buy the mobile AC unit, but none of the new-builds in the past 10+ years come with a built-in (fixed) unit.
Ironically, since the present court case is essentially driven and funded by Greanpeace, even the co-founder of Greenpeace publicly states that there is no climate emergency. See e.g https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20220208/114392/HHRG....
Here is a very interesting new documentary which covers relevant facts presented by renowned scientists and Nobel Prize winners, everyone interested in this topic should have a look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmfRG8-RHEI.
Those swiss baboushkas will be writing complaints from their gulag cells in broken Russian or Chinese.
Nice job. When conquered by the authoritarian regimes, we are going to lose the environment much quicker while losing our freedom, democracy and human rights too.
Two months away of celebrating the return of freedom to the country, the end of colonial war, and the secret state police doing whatever they felt like.
I'm considering moving to Portugal next year to be further away from Russian border, from outside it looks like fairly quiet and stable-ish place.
So it depends pretty much how they will do their goverment deals with other parties, as means to get their proposals approved.
From 230 seats, 58 belong to the extreme right, up from 20 in 2022.
There is unfortunely a trend there, and even if we are quite cool on these left/right matters at the population level, it suffices that the new laws aren't that cool any longer.