The European Court of Human Rights looked into global warming on Wednesday, during an unprecedented hearing, at the request of six young Portuguese people who criticize 32 states for their “inaction” in the matter.
The six young people, aged 11 to 24, filed a complaint before the ECHR following the forest fires which ravaged their country in 2017, killing more than 100 people.
“I hope that the court will understand the urgency of this situation and that it will decide in favor of our case,” said one of the complainants, André Oliveira, 15, at the end of the hearing.
Faced with the arguments of the targeted states, he said he was “shocked by the countries’ attempt to ignore the evidence and trivialize the damage we are already facing.”
This is the first time that the Court, whose jurisprudence on global warming is still virgin, was seized of a request concerning such a large number of States (the 27 members of the European Union, Norway, the Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Russia).
The hearing took place in front of a packed room, with more than 80 lawyers and jurists representing the 32 incriminated states. Only Ukraine, against which the applicants abandoned their demands, and Russia, which has no longer sat on the ECHR since 2022, were not represented.
-Uncertain admissibility-
The debates mainly focused on the admissibility of the case, strongly contested by the respondent States. They underlined the absence of exhaustion of remedies before national courts, usually required to refer the matter to the ECHR, and called into question the applicants’ status as victims in the face of the policies of States of which they are not nationals.
“We understand the seriousness of the fight against climate change,” declared the representative of the British government, Sudhanshu Swaroop, speaking on behalf of the incriminated states.
But “the applicants are all Portuguese, resident in Portugal, they come under the jurisdiction of Portugal. They do not come under the jurisdiction” of other States, which do not have the capacity to protect them from global warming, he said. -he argued.
“We can congratulate these young people for their commitment to this cause, which cannot be ignored,” said Ricardo Matos, representative of the Portuguese government.
“But in this case, they have not proven harm. Their arguments focus on the impacts of climate change, but do not prove that they are personal victims. Mere conjecture is not enough.”
The lawyers of the six Portuguese called on the Court not to “look away”.
Refusing to grant them protection “would mean saying that the problem is too big, too complicated and that human rights (…) are at the end of the line”, declared Alison Macdonald.
She stressed that a “ton of greenhouse gas emitted in France has the same effect as a ton coming from Portugal”, and that this country did not “have the capacity, on its own, to protect the applicants “.
She also described as “insufficient” the European Union’s strategy, and its national variations, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, considering that it did not make it possible to respect the global warming target of 1.5 degrees set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
At the end of the hearing, the president gave the parties two additional weeks to address written conclusions to the questions formulated by the judges. The decision is not expected to be made for several months.
-“Understanding the urgency”-
“States have sought to avoid scrutiny of their climate policies, focusing only on the admissibility criteria of the case,” lamented Gearóid O Cuinn, director of the Global Legal Action Network (Glan), the NGO which supports the six applicants.
“But no government has refuted the evidence we have put forward that their policies collectively lead to 3 degrees of warming or more,” he observed after the debates.
27/09/2023 22:50:47 – Strasbourg (AFP) © 2023 AFP
