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The largest legal test of governments on climate change will come in Europe’s top human rights court this week, with rulings on a trio of cases brought by individuals from a wide range of ages and backgrounds across the continent.
The most prominent case is led by Portuguese nationals, aged from the early teens to mid-20s, bringing the claim that the 32 governments, including 27 EU member states plus Norway, Turkey, the UK and Switzerland, failed to adequately cut the emissions behind global warming.
The court will on Tuesday also decide on a case brought by a group of senior Swiss women, mainly in their 70s, who claim that Switzerland’s inadequate climate policies violate their right to life and health, arguing their age and gender put them in a high-risk category for temperature-related mortality.
The third case involves a former French mayor of the Grande-Synthe municipality, a low-lying north-eastern coastal area vulnerable to sea rise.
Each case has argued before the Grand Chamber in Strasbourg that the governments involved are breaching human rights by failing to protect the applicants against the damage from climate change.
The Portuguese youth said that their right to life, privacy and family, and to be free from mental or physical torture, under the European Convention of Human Rights, had been infringed by multiple years of extreme heat and wildfires in their country. They said they had not been able to attend school or leave their homes, and struggled to sleep as temperatures topped 40C.
Named after the three siblings among the Portuguese citizens, the Duarte Agostinho case has been described by lawyers as a “David and Goliath” action, as the first time that so many countries have had to defend a climate case in European courts.
“If we win, we know that this movement will come together to pressure governments to comply with the court’s ruling,” said Sofia Oliveira, who was aged 12 when wildfires in central Portugal killed more than 100 people in 2017.
“And if we don’t win everything, I hope this will also encourage people to join the movement of people working together for a life of the future for all.”
The lawyer leading the Portuguese case, Gerry Liston, said that the ruling would “set a precedent for other international courts”.
“The judgment we are seeking would in effect be the same as legally binding regional treaty . . . that would compel them to rapidly reduce their emissions but would also force them to compel major companies in Europe to cut their emissions throughout their global supply chains to be in line with 1.5C,” he said, referring to the Paris Agreement to limit the temperature rise from pre-industrial levels.
The former French mayor, Damien Careme, a Greens party member, has argued that his Grande-Synthe suburb of Dunkirk is now at far greater risk of severe flooding due to the effects of climate change.
The judges also heard arguments last year about the psychological as well as physical damage. It was one of the first times the mental health impacts of climate change had been brought before the court, legal experts said.
“The mental health argument is strong in climate cases because instead of showing projected future harms, it shows that young people are being harmed right now,” climate lawyer Paul Rink said.
Sébastien Duyck, a lawyer and campaign manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, said that categorising climate harms as inhuman treatment went to “the essence of human dignity, highlighting the right for life to be enjoyed. It’s not just about being alive.”
Lawyers for the governments argued there was no evidence of “a causal link between the alleged medical conditions and the alleged action or inaction by the respondent states regarding climate change”.
The governments also argued that the global accord to address climate change under the 2015 Paris Agreement meant that “the applicants attempt to impose a parallel regime [ . . .] asking the court to act as legislators rather than judges”.
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