The action of NGOs and local authorities, who were asking the courts to compel TotalEnergies to align its climate strategy with the Paris agreement, was deemed inadmissible by the Paris court, according to the decision consulted on Thursday July 6 by the France Media Agency.
The court considers that this coalition did not respect the requirements of the negotiation phase that the law imposes before being able to take legal action against a large French company which would not respect its “duty of vigilance” on the human and environmental risks related to its activities.
Procedural starting point of the case, “the formal notice issued on June 19, 2019 to the company TotalEnergies does not constitute a sufficient arrest and could not serve as a basis for useful negotiation before the issuance of the summons” before the court , writes the judge.
Conviction of Shell in 2021
According to the law, this formal notice opens a period of three months for the company to respond and, if necessary, to comply before any legal action. For the judge, “it is not conceivable to go to court in order to obtain a plan”, supposed to set the group’s strategy to prevent climate risks from its activities, “including quantified objectives which do not appear in the plan. formal notice and therefore could not be discussed beforehand”.
“This worrying decision restricts access to justice for associations and victims, in disputes based on the duty of vigilance”, deplored the coalition of six associations and sixteen communities, led by Sherpa and Notre affair à tous. “On a controversial procedural issue, we are once again delaying the examination of the merits of the case, while TotalEnergies is still not taking the necessary measures to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,” it added, without clarify whether the coalition would appeal this decision.
The NGOs hope one day to obtain a French equivalent of the condemnation of Shell in 2021 in the Netherlands, when a court had required the group to accelerate its plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
The French judge’s interpretation confirms the decision taken on February 28 by other magistrates of the Paris court in a first case opposing TotalEnergies to associations: the judges had declared inadmissible the claims of opponents of the group’s controversial oil megaproject in Uganda and in Tanzania for similar reasons.
