By Emma Farge and Gloria Dickie
BERN (Reuters) – Switzerland’s lower house parliament has voted to reject a landmark court ruling ordering the country to do more to combat global warming, in a move that could encourage others to resist the influence of international courts.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
The Strasbourg-based court in April found in favour of more than 2,000 Swiss women – known as KlimaSeniorinnen – who said their country’s inaction in the face of rising temperatures puts them at risk of dying in heatwaves.
Switzerland must tell the Council of Europe, to which the court belongs, by October how it will implement the decision.
No member state has ever refused to implement a judgment, said Council of Europe spokesperson Andrew Cutting, although he stressed the case was at a very early stage of implementation.
Switzerland’s governing Federal Council is free to break with parliament and comply with the judgment. However, the environment minister, one of its seven members, has also appeared to question the impact of the ruling.
HOW COULD SWITZERLAND COMPLY WITH THE COURT?
Switzerland is legally obliged to implement the ruling under the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights it ratified in 1974.
However, it is not unusual for countries to drag their feet.
According to the European Implementation Network, nearly half of all leading judgments handed down by the court in the last decade are still pending full implementation, taking on average over six years.
Views differ on what measures Switzerland would need to take to comply with the ruling.
Helen Keller, a Swiss former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, said the Strasbourg court was asking less than national courts had required in previous climate cases, such as a case against the Netherlands in 2019.
Dennis van Berkel, legal counsel for the environmental group Urgenda Foundation which brought the Dutch case, said it would require policy revisions since Switzerland is taking up a share of the remaining global carbon budget that is twice the size of its population.
Since the court is not prescriptive in the steps required, that could be done through national or international measures to help other countries reduce their carbon emissions, he said.
CAN THE KLIMASENIORINNEN TAKE ACTION?
A committee of the Council meets four times a year to monitor compliance with ECHR rulings.
The applicants in the original case, KlimaSeniorinnen composed of over 2,500 women over 64, can complain to the Council of Europe committee if they feel that Switzerland is non-compliant.
A lawyer for the women’s group Raphael Mahaim told Reuters it was considering doing that, possibly even before the October deadline given parliament’s actions.
COULD SWISS LEAVE EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS?
In exceptional cases, the committee can refer cases back to the court. This has happened twice in the court’s 65-year history.
Expulsion from the Council of Europe is a possibility. Russia was expelled in March 2022 after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Countries can also leave the convention which the Strasbourg court oversees if they no longer want to comply as some British government members have hinted at – although not acted upon.
Greece temporarily withdrew during the rule of a military junta during the 1960s-1970s.
However, legal experts said it remained unlikely the Swiss case would trigger an exodus and that it was more likely that Switzerland would come under pressure to accept the ruling.
Climate litigation expert Joana Setzer at the London School of Economics said the monitoring system encouraged compliance and that there would be “significant political and social repercussions” for countries leaving it.
Switzerland’s former president, Alain Berset, is running to become the next secretary general of the Council of Europe and elections are due later this month.
COULD OTHER COUNTRIES FOLLOW SUIT?
Isabela Keuschnigg, legal researcher with the London School of Economics, said that if the Swiss refused to implement the ruling, it could “set a concerning precedent, undermining the role of legal oversight in democratic governance”.
It would also be evidence of political pushback against international climate action, especially after the broad far-right gains in this month’s European parliament election.
(Reporting by Emma Farge in Bern and Gloria Dickie in London; Editing by Alison Williams)
Comments