How a group of Swiss women secured a victory on climate legislation

For Pia Hollenstein, the long-awaited ruling from the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought against the Swiss government by her group, KlimaSeniorinnen, came at an inconvenient time. At 73, the retired nurse and former St. Gallen MP is an avid mountaineer and, on the day of the verdict, planned to climb the Grisons Alps. Still, she knew she couldn’t miss her day in court after a wait that lasted eight long years. “So I flew to Strasbourg,” she tells TIME, “because it was important that we all came together to turn everything that happened into something positive.”

The women, all over 65, argued that they were especially vulnerable to the health impacts of increased heatwaves due to their age. For the first time, an international court agreed. On April 8, it issued a historic verdict in its favor, ruling that Switzerland’s failure to combat climate change by failing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions clearly violated the rights of the group’s 2,500 members. “The European Court of Human Rights states that protecting the climate is protecting human rights”, says Joana Setzer, head of the Research Department at Grantham Research Institute. World Climate Change Laws project. “So now you have to protect people from the threats this will cause to their life and health.”

Although the decision legally obliges the Swiss government to set better climate targets, the state is ultimately responsible for compliance. Still, Setzer says the case is especially significant for two reasons: not only is Switzerland now legally required to act more quickly to manage the impact of climate change, but the case also set a precedent for similar climate lawsuits across the world. world. “Climate litigation is a transnational issue,” she says. “If the EU’s highest human rights court confirms that this is a human rights issue, then the judges will look beyond their jurisdiction to this precedent for climate cases in Australia, Brazil or Argentina.”

See more information: European Court awards Swiss women historic climate victory

The court’s decision is also a multigenerational victory, one that goes beyond this group of women, says Setzer. “It is a decision that will apply to and benefit young people around the world.”

Despite losing their case in several Swiss courts, the KlimaSeniorinnen women have kept their hopes alive over the years. “It was extraordinary to maintain the fight all this time without winning anything”, says Hollenstein, who is also part of the group’s board, “but the most important thing is that we finally achieved something for human rights”.

While Hollenstein rejoiced over the verdict along with other members of the group in court, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg applauded them from the sidelines. “This is just the beginning of climate litigation,” Thunberg told reporters. “This means we have to fight even harder… because in a climate emergency, everything is at stake.”

Despite being one of the richest countries in the world, Switzerland has struggled to implement climate policies that sufficiently offset greenhouse gas emissions, especially in meeting targets outlined by ambitious bilateral agreements. For example, as part of its obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement – ​​which aims to limit global warming by limiting global temperature increases to 1.5°C, or 2.7°F, above pre-industrial levels – Switzerland has committed to reducing emissions by 50% by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050. But Climate Action Tracker, an independent monitor, labeled the country’s climate goals and policies are “insufficient”, noting that the government will need to substantially improve its climate action by 2030 to meet the agreement’s goals.

The impacts of global warming are increasingly evident. Last month marked the world’s hottest March on recordwith scientists warning that climate change could move “into unknown territory” if temperatures do not fall by the end of the year, according to a BBC report.

In Europe, a study estimated that by 2022, high temperatures may have been responsible for more than 70,000 excess deaths. Several studies to have researched why heat has a much greater impact on women’s health, including discoveries from the scientific magazine Nature, who stated that this could be partially explained by physiological differences, sociocultural factors and the fact that women often tend to live longer than men. KlimaSeniorinnen relied on these findings, along with personal experience, to successfully argue that extreme temperatures violated his human rights.

Elisabeth Stern remembers Pizol, a mountain in northeastern Switzerland, that towered over her backyard when she was a child. “Today, that glacier has almost completely disappeared,” the 76-year-old told TIME, describing how the ice melted each summer.

Although Stern joined KlimaSeniorinnen six years ago, she says the impact of hot flashes on her health has really started to intensify over the past two years. “I had a panic attack when I was traveling on public transport and I couldn’t get out because it was so hot,” she says. “It was a horrible experience not knowing what was happening to my body. I could barely breathe.”

It took nearly 12 hours for Stern’s condition to stabilize and his blood circulation to return to normal. But even now, whenever temperatures exceed 30°C, she is unable to leave the house and perform basic functions. “It’s so unbearably hot that you can’t even sleep in bed,” she says.

KlimaSeniorinnen compiled their experiences in the case against the Swiss government with the support of Greenpeace, an international non-profit organization that, for almost a decade, first proposed the case based on the idea that the climate crisis hurts everyone. In Swiss courts at regional and national level, however, judges continued to reject the proposal on procedural grounds.

“From the beginning, we were convinced that Switzerland was violating its obligation to protect these women, but the courts would tell us that it was not in their power to decide this,” says Cordelia Bähr, lead lawyer at KlimaSeniorinnen.

All domestic legal remedies were exhausted after the Swiss Supreme Court dismissed the case. Bähr says the group knew they would have to approach the European Court of Human Rights next. The Swiss government was quick to rebuke KlimaSeniorinnen’s attempts. “Defining and choosing the measures to be taken is in fact a matter of responsibility for the government, parliament and people of Switzerland,” the document told the international court.

But in a text of 250 pages judgment, the judicial bench of 17 judges disagreed with the Swiss government. Not only did it find that Switzerland’s policies are inadequate and violate women’s rights to life and health, it also concluded that the Swiss Supreme Court’s decision was arbitrary because it rejected women’s access to the court, and that the Swiss authorities failed to resolve complaints and find effective solutions.

One of the “most striking aspects” of the case, Setzer says, was that the judges developed a five-step test designed to assess whether the government’s measures provided adequate protection. “This decision showed that the court carefully studied the science of the case,” says Setzer. “And it gives very clear, step-by-step instructions on how states should handle climate litigation.”

Switzerland is not the only country that will have to comply with the European court’s instructions. In fact, this decision will now be legally binding for 46 countries in Europe that are currently facing a growing wave of similar cases in the courts.

In Norway, six young climate activists presented a case against the Norwegian government to try to stop the expansion of fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic. In Austria, another applicant suffering from a temperature-dependent form of multiple sclerosis argued that your condition makes you particularly vulnerable to hot flashes. And in the United Kingdom, climate activist group Friends of the Earth, along with two individuals, presented a case against the government’s “inadequate” climate protection policies. The case is scheduled for a High Court hearing in June, after judges previously observed that the European convention had not yet been applied to climate change – something that KlimaSeniorinnen’s verdict has now changed.

If the next advisory opinions on climate change from the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights cite the ruling, so the case could also have a greater impact on climate change litigation outside European borders, where courts are increasingly questioning state responsibility when reviewing climate lawsuits.

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The decision could also have an effect on Switzerland’s new climate goals. The country, which allows voters to have a say on a wide range of issues, has postponed the implementation of a new CO2 Law in 2021 after voters rejected it in a public referendum. However, last year, voters once again supported a new climate law that aims to move the country towards carbon neutrality by 2050. Now, the court has ordered the Swiss government to not only set targets around carbon neutrality in accordance with minimum governance standards, but also that it has a defined timeline.

Still, even victory in Strasbourg does not guarantee political change, which the European court left in the hands of ministers, and which will require the vote of the Swiss people in another referendum.

“On the one hand, this is a true success story of a climate case brought to court that affirms the obligation of governments to take action,” says Michael Burger, Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. But “the court did not direct the government to undertake any specific actions to achieve the necessary real-world transformations.”

KlimaSeniorinnen now plans to dedicate its time to ensuring that the Swiss government acts accordingly. “I hope Switzerland accepts this court advice as an opportunity to do more, rather than waiting for all these women to simply disappear,” says Hollenstein.

Stern, who has just returned to his home in Zurich after celebrating with the group and countless press interviews, agrees. “In the longer term, we will ensure the government does what it should now do by delivering a clear climate policy.”