The European Court of Human Rights condemns Switzerland in a lawsuit brought by elderly women from that country. However, it knocks down the lawsuit that six young Portuguese had raised against Portugal and 31 other European countries.
The Strasbourg Court issued a ruling this Tuesday described as historic in favor of one of the three claims raised for insufficient action of the States to limit climate change and has considered that Swiss has violated the human rights of a group of elderly women
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), based in Strasbourg, has condemned Switzerland in a lawsuit brought by elderly women from that country.
The president of the ECHR, Síofra O’Leary, has pointed out that Switzerland has violated the rights of these women, gathered in the Verein KlimaSeniorinnen association, because “critical gaps” have been found in Swiss policies against climate change.
Specifically, European judges consider that Switzerland has failed to comply with its obligations towards the rights of these elderly women (more than half are over 75 years old) to prevent them from suffering the effects of global warming.
They have noted that there have been shortcomings in Swiss policy to quantify, through carbon pricing or otherwise, the limitation of its greenhouse emissions.
Along the same lines, they affirm that Switzerland did not respect in the past the objectives it had set to reduce these emissions.
However, the judges have overturned the media lawsuit that six young Portuguese had filed against Portugalbut also against 31 other European countries that they intended to condemn for insufficient policies to mitigate climate change.
The judges have dismissed their allegations without examining the merits of the matter in the first place because the six plaintiffs ignored a fundamental rule of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which is that the country’s domestic remedies must be exhausted. that they denounce before taking a case to Strasbourg.
The young people had argued that the climate emergency exempted them from that basic legal rule, but the ECtHR has not accepted that thesis.
In addition to the lawsuit by a group of elderly women from the Verein KlimaSeniorinnen association of Switzerland, the so-called “Duarte Agostinho” case or the lawsuit that six young Portuguese people had filed against Portugal, there is a third filed, in that case, against the government of France.
Source: Eitb
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