European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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 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 scale, for someone who actually cares about the environment. Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.
Wether the actions have been approved by a democratic majority seems orthogonal to whether human rights have been violated (if a government performs torture on some humans it would still be a human rights issue even if there's democratic support for it).
The fact that this would imply that other countries, such as India and China, also would have similar human rights issues doesn't seem very strange either - several countries often violate human rights in the same way.
Not saying I agree with the legal case, but your explanations of why it's "insane" doesn't really hold water to me.
> This is legitimately insane. 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. And people are suing over whatever a tiny European state doesn't do to stop environmental harm. Which may or may not even effect the people who are suing at all.
The court was created to evaluate any situation that violates the general principles of the European Convention of Human Rights. There is no rule that only those suffering an injustice is allowed to complain about it.
> 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.
The government is still the final party responsible for having policies and nation-level actions adhere to laws and conventions.
It would not be fair to sue John and Jane Doe for having voted for a possibly non-compliant government action, or for failing to push policy suggestions sufficiently for them to be voted into action. The regular population only has limited knowledge about statecraft.
> 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?
India and China are not parties to the European Convention on Human Rights. Switzerland is. Whataboutism also has no relevance to the court ruling.
I also think it’s preposterous to put climate change at their feet
The more steps you take towards any goal, the greater the fractional impact of each subsequent step.
Reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions needs changes on par with:
• "every nation must reduce all emissions to zero, except Ghana who can continue as-is": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
• or "every source of emissions must be reduced to zero, except for the degradation of grassland which can continue as-is": https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
> are going to have the net effect of at best kicking the can down the road a few more years.
All individual climate initiatives "kick the can down the road N more years" when viewed in isolation. What you need to look at is where the can started, and how to get people to keep kicking until it makes it all the way off the map.
Phasing out CFCs kicked the can N years, phasing out HCFCs and HFCs kick it N more, tightening up emission regulations and not having individuals commute in 12 liter hemis with cat delete and coal rolling mods kick it N more, tightening up international shipping emissions another N years, etc.
Personally I don't agree with the ECHR's definitions/breadth of remit, and I suspect that I am not alone. I believe it's the sort of ruling that devalues what should be an important control mechanism on protecting people from serious abuse. But, just my pov and others are free to vote in line with theirs!
It's basically the only thing we can do at this point if we want to have a planet left by 2100.
Also China is fabricating basically all your products, so of course it's only natural they also produce more pollution.
While I too find it somewhat weird that the ECHR is involved in climate regulation, I find the appeal to majority/democracy to be missing the point of constitutional legal systems, and European Convention on Human Rights is a sort of a constitution. Without independent judiciary that is not subject to the pressures by the majority (ideally), even democracy itself wouldn't survive, not to mention the rights of the minority, say people who will be displaced or will lose their livelihood due to the climate change (albeit Switzerland should be one of the countries least negative affected by the climate change).
Isn’t that fairly common? Slavery in the US, Nazi concentration camps, Rawandan ethnic cleansing…
In their effort to optimize locally, they lose globally.
Climate immutability is not a human right, but if something is shown to cause harm, then you might reasonably expect humanity to limit this harm.
I appreciate the judge here making a stand for something they believe in, but it's not easily defensible
Yes, I realize I'm arguing against capitalism in some sense and no, that does not imply I'm a communist. I'm just pointing out a fundamental flaw, but I don't have an alternative.
a) You know the answer.
b) Last time I looked on the map, India was not in Europe.
> Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.
Either you're arguing in bad faith, or you don't understand that this might help pushing governments to take stricter measures.
There is an international court of human rights. How often was India found guilty there?
>Either you're arguing in bad faith, or you don't understand that this might help pushing governments to take stricter measures.
I am 100% convinced that there is nothing which makes you object more to climate protection than a foreign entity trying to compel the government you control to "do more".
And even if. When will India/China act? How many International court of human rights ruling will that take?
The International Criminal Court is not the European Court of Human Rights.
The ICC appears to be focused on crimes against humanity, and I'm not a lawyer so I'd be even worse than ChatGPT at figuring out if climate change would be under that banner.
India is neither a state party, nor a signatory, to the ICC, so (again, IANAL) I assume that means they can't be taken before it.
> When will India/China act?
They already are, because despite the memes the problem itself is directly relevant to both, and the solution happens to be a cheap export opportunity and soft power projection opportunity for one, and a subsidised cheap economy growth opportunity for the other.
> When will India/China act?
First, China has made promises, and have acted a bit. But we, the people, don't hold leverage over China nor India, so it will be on their citizens to achieve any progress, or on international powers to apply sanctions. But international politics is extremely slow and change averse, so probably the 2C limit will have become unavoidable by the time that happens.
But above all: this decision does not depend on China nor India. It's totally irrelevant to object to it by appealing to those countries.
There isn't. There is the ICJ, which handles disputes between states, and the ICC, which handles war crimes etc. and definitely isn't going to judge climate legislation.
The ECHR rules that Switzerland has failed to meet its treaty obligations WRT climate action. IE, there's been an internal failure by Switzerland's government and courts to enforce its own legislation and treaty obligations. So, these women took the next step - an international court (to which Switzerland is a party - if the Swiss don't like it, they should vote to abandon their obligation to the ECHR).
It bothers me for the same reason that some people are dismayed by attempts at compelled speech. Because it gets a problem ass backwards.
One cannot claim that inaction is a violation of human rights.
All of us have the right to just look at the world and throw our hands up in the air, and cry, and say "I just don't know what to do!". Climate change is a tragedy that makes the greatest people, the most compassionate, motivated experts freeze in fear an inaction.
What is wrong and is a blatant violation of human rights in the face of looming catastrophe is inhibiting or sabotaging action. For example, the UK government has gone out of its way to spitefully outlaw legitimate peaceful protest by environmentalists.
Complaining about inaction while failing to step up and defend rights to action is hypocritical and a passive.
The Swiss promised to do their part to mitigate climate change. They failed to do so. So, a group of Swiss citizens took the government to court to compel action. Nothing that seems particularly unreasonable to me.
Now, whether this ruling can actually move anything... who knows. How can you make governments do something? Meaningless fines, strong words and other toothless gestures?
I am not optimistic. For 40 years I'm used to being actively lied to by a corrupt and inept government. They will burn the planet rather than concede a single penny of profit for their cronies.
That's why I say, the ECHR would be much better off defending the rights to action. That would give encouragement to people. It should be illegal for the UK or any government to inhibit lawful protest (including making laws to do that).
> Decision of the Court > The Court began by noting that it could deal with the issues arising from climate change only within > the limits of the exercise of its competence under Article 19 (Establishment of the Court) of the > Convention, which is to ensure the observance of the engagements undertaken by the High > Contracting Parties to the Convention and its Protocol
So this is not even a news to discuss. Flagged.
However, the European Convention of Human Rights was a decision we as a larger society made, as a deliberate safe-guard against having other decisions (or lack thereof) conflict with what we considered the basic requirements for a decent human life. Unless the convention is abandoned, no society that agreed to it can decide (including inaction through indecision!) on something that conflicts with it.
I know of a certain kingdom of life that would strongly disagree
Do the members of that kingdom have standing when it comes to Swiss law?
You'll have to consult that kingdom's appropriate court of rights though. The European Convention for Human Rights had a quite narrow scope in that regard.
India is not by any sensible measure a "major offender". They do have the third highest total emissions but that is because they have the largest or second largest population. Their per capita emissions are half of Switzerland's.
And yes, per capita is a far better measure than per country unless you can make a case that the people of some countries have some sort of natural or divine right to live a higher CO2 lifestyle.
The women who filed the suit are Swiss.
I'm all for suing other nations as well, but we (wealthy western nations) need to get our ducks in a row first. No point suing Poland about coal use while we (USA) also burn coal.
Pointing to the inaction of other countries as an excuse for one's own inaction is a weak argument. Good luck suing Russia. (They were actually a member of the Council of Europe until 2022, so this decision would have applied to them...)
But then this feels like suing somebody for emptying his ashtray in a canal where 100 meter further a factory is discharging chemical waste. Good luck suing the factory.
If Switzerland does too little for the environment it can not happen against the will of the population. Surely having some foreign court compell them makes them overthink their wrong choices.
[0]: https://www.ejpd.admin.ch/ejpd/de/home/themen/abstimmungen/v...
Are you saying that human rights cannot be violated if a democratic decision was made beforehand?
The impacts of climate change are going to be seen and felt initially by people who had literally no say in the matter.
So no, human rights and climate change are completely intertwined.
It's easy for this to be out of sight out of mind for anyone living in a colder climate or with enough income to ensure indoors air conditioning.
Thus far this tactic has been used by "progressives" for "progressive" causes so critics of the process tends to be labelled "right-wing" or some form of *-ist or *-denier so as to make them untouchable. Those who support this type of legal strong-arming of the political process would do well to contemplate how this same tactic can be used by their political opponents to force their governments to enact policies they oppose.
Given your nick I assume you're from the USA (and/or work for Intel...) so there are already some examples of this happening in both directions, e.g. first the establishment of a federal 'right to abortion' in Roe vs. Wade which was then withdrawn when the supreme court decision on Roe vs Wade pushed abortion legislation back to the state level. The laws are in place - both on state as well as federate level - for forcing your state and federal government to restrict migration and clamp down on district attorneys who are unwilling to prosecute criminals, all it takes is for some entity to manage to get a case in a 'friendly' court. Will you see such decisions in the same light as you're portraying this decision?
What I'm arguing here is that we've democratically elected leaders that have put the system in place that allows citizens to bring grievances when they have no other recourse to protect their rights. You can't then turn around and say that's an abuse of democracy, I feel it's the result.
What I think you're really arguing against is the existence of 'friendly' courts. Lady Justice should be blind and so whether progressive or conservative, if a court does its job and applies the law as our democratically elected leaders have written them I honestly don't care. Even if that means it will sometimes rule in a way I disagree with.
I prefer to keep the courts out of the political discourse other than in cases where politicos violate the law of the land in which case I want them to deal with those cases swiftly and decisively. Especially in Europe where we do not elect our judges and prosecutors and as such have no means to reign in activists within the justice department (which do exist, see e.g. 'Hilda' and 'Ruben' in Sweden [1,2]) I want there to be a clear separation between the two.
[1] https://mrrs.se/ordf_blog/hilda-ruben-stridet-mot-grundlagen...
[2] https://www.advokatsamfundet.se/om-advokatsamfundet/tidigare...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...
Many of the same talking points came up again immediately in the form of Brexit and the various European Courts.
Also, I get the impression (from up to 9 time zones away) that this kind of thing is also part of the power struggle in the US between states and DC.