Climate extremists look like they scored a major victory in Strasbourg on Tuesday with an announcement from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in favor of a case by four elderly Swiss women claiming that the state was violating their human rights by not sufficiently living up to its climate obligations.
The ECHR is an international court set up to rule on alleged violations of the European Convention on Human Rights. Its judges are elected by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, a human rights organization comprising 46 nations, each of which submits a list of three nominees for consideration.
While the ECHR is not formally part of the EU administration, it has functioned as an instrument to enforce policies Eurocrats would like to see implemented. The Strasbourg-based court has, for example, been instrumental in frustrating attempts to reform the UK asylum system using the so-called Rwanda Plan to deport failed applicants to the African state, leading to calls for the UK to withdraw from the court.
Tuesday’s landmark verdict reinterprets Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights around the “right to a family life” by claiming that climate change had an “adverse effect” on women’s human rights, specifically due to their inability to handle hot weather due to their advanced age. The panel of judges decided 16 to 1 in favor of the women in a case that had been rumbling through the Swiss judicial system for several years before being brought to the ECHR.
The four women, mostly in their 70s, were part of a series of three wedge cases on climate change decided on by the ECHR on April 9th Their campaign has been publicly backed by climate change icon Greta Thunberg and is likely to have a significant dampening effect on rolling back aspects of the green agenda.
The ruling specifically mentions Switzerland’s supposed failure to deleverage from fossil fuels and embrace net zero policies. The ECHR implored the Swiss government to take steps to address ‘critical gaps’ in the nation’s climate policy, including not establishing “relevant targets and timelines” on carbon emissions.
While applicable only to Switzerland—for now—the verdict could have major ramifications for European energy policy in the 46 member states.
“We still can’t really believe it. We keep asking our lawyers, ‘Is that right?’” exclaimed one of the Swiss women, Rosemarie Wydler-Walti, to the press Tuesday.
The ECHR rejected two similar cases by Portuguese teenagers and a former French mayor due to jurisdiction issues.
The verdict comes at a time when populism at home and choppy international relations abroad mean that EU member states are scaling back climate commitments ahead of June’s EU elections.
