This is legitimately insane. You have a court, which was created in an attempt to give legal options to victims of crimes committed by nation states and which could not be heard elsewhere. And people are suing over whatever a tiny European state doesn't do to stop environmental harm, which may or may not even effect the people who are suing at all.
And these people are from the country on earth where the population has the greatest control over their government. Switzerland isn't some rogue state, the population has legal means to force the government to do essentially whatever they want. So the human rights violation is being committed by the population themselves.
If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
It really must be dismaying to see how little anyone actually cares about the environment on a global scale, for someone who actually cares about the environment. Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.
Wether the actions have been approved by a democratic majority seems orthogonal to whether human rights have been violated (if a government performs torture on some humans it would still be a human rights issue even if there's democratic support for it).
The fact that this would imply that other countries, such as India and China, also would have similar human rights issues doesn't seem very strange either - several countries often violate human rights in the same way.
Not saying I agree with the legal case, but your explanations of why it's "insane" doesn't really hold water to me.
Maybe it is insane but the prisoners dilemma we face regarding climate inaction is also insane. I don't have a solution to propose but can appreciate the kafkaesque nightmare we've barrelled in to.
I have not formed any opinion whatsoever about the decision itself, but regarding the court itself:
> This is legitimately insane. You have a court, which was created in an attempt to give legal options to victims of crimes committed by nation state and which could not be heard elsewhere. And people are suing over whatever a tiny European state doesn't do to stop environmental harm. Which may or may not even effect the people who are suing at all.
The court was created to evaluate any situation that violates the general principles of the European Convention of Human Rights. There is no rule that only those suffering an injustice is allowed to complain about it.
> And these people are from the country on earth where the population has the greatest control over their government. Switzerland isn't some rogue state, the population has legal means to force the government to do essentially whatever they want. So the human rights violation is essentially being committed by the population themselves.
The government is still the final party responsible for having policies and nation-level actions adhere to laws and conventions.
It would not be fair to sue John and Jane Doe for having voted for a possibly non-compliant government action, or for failing to push policy suggestions sufficiently for them to be voted into action. The regular population only has limited knowledge about statecraft.
> If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
India and China are not parties to the European Convention on Human Rights. Switzerland is. Whataboutism also has no relevance to the court ruling.
It's not really "whataboutism" in the context of the problem when you realize that we're locked in the same closed system as them. It's just absurd to think that the younger generations are being told that if they want to enjoy a similar quality of life as their parents did, they are directly causing the destruction of the world, when in reality the sacrifices they are being asked to make are going to have the net effect of at best kicking the can down the road a few more years.
I think most people would agree that rationally no amount of action by the Swiss Government is going to change the climate change experienced by the claimants. But I also concede that line of thinking ends in never doing anything. It's a fair position to say not doing your share is meaningful.
Personally I don't agree with the ECHR's definitions/breadth of remit, and I suspect that I am not alone. I believe it's the sort of ruling that devalues what should be an important control mechanism on protecting people from serious abuse. But, just my pov and others are free to vote in line with theirs!
The Swiss Federal Constitution says that federal courts have to enforce national laws, but also international agreements. That's all. Swiss courts have just failed their own constitutional duties according to this supranational instance.
Also China is fabricating basically all your products, so of course it's only natural they also produce more pollution.
>So the human rights violation is essentially being committed by the population themselves.
While I too find it somewhat weird that the ECHR is involved in climate regulation, I find the appeal to majority/democracy to be missing the point of constitutional legal systems, and European Convention on Human Rights is a sort of a constitution. Without independent judiciary that is not subject to the pressures by the majority (ideally), even democracy itself wouldn't survive, not to mention the rights of the minority, say people who will be displaced or will lose their livelihood due to the climate change (albeit Switzerland should be one of the countries least negative affected by the climate change).
>b) Last time I looked on the map, India was not in Europe.
There is an international court of human rights. How often was India found guilty there?
>Either you're arguing in bad faith, or you don't understand that this might help pushing governments to take stricter measures.
I am 100% convinced that there is nothing which makes you object more to climate protection than a foreign entity trying to compel the government you control to "do more".
And even if. When will India/China act? How many International court of human rights ruling will that take?
If democracy isn’t working and you’re looking for an outside authority to start forcing your agenda on people, then what you’re looking for is tyranny.
I agree that the ruling is troubling - if we take the article on face
value.
It bothers me for the same reason that some people are dismayed by
attempts at compelled speech. Because it gets a problem ass backwards.
One cannot claim that inaction is a violation of human rights.
All of us have the right to just look at the world and throw our hands
up in the air, and cry, and say "I just don't know what to
do!". Climate change is a tragedy that makes the greatest people, the
most compassionate, motivated experts freeze in fear an inaction.
What is wrong and is a blatant violation of human rights in the face
of looming catastrophe is inhibiting or sabotaging action. For
example, the UK government has gone out of its way to spitefully
outlaw legitimate peaceful protest by environmentalists.
Complaining about inaction while failing to step up and defend rights
to action is hypocritical and a passive.
Switzerland is party to treaties that concern climate change and action. Switzerland is failing to meet these obligations. So, some women sued in international court. That's what the court ruled - that Switzerland is failing to meet its obligations under the law.
> Decision of the Court
> The Court began by noting that it could deal with the issues arising from climate change only within
> the limits of the exercise of its competence under Article 19 (Establishment of the Court) of the
> Convention, which is to ensure the observance of the engagements undertaken by the High
> Contracting Parties to the Convention and its Protocol
To play devil's advocate, it seems fair that a human has the right to not have their air poisoned, or to have a future on the planet for their kids. No idea if that matches any of its articles though.
However, the European Convention of Human Rights was a decision we as a larger society made, as a deliberate safe-guard against having other decisions (or lack thereof) conflict with what we considered the basic requirements for a decent human life. Unless the convention is abandoned, no society that agreed to it can decide (including inaction through indecision!) on something that conflicts with it.
The majority of people are short-sighted and/or greedy. The only way to make change is through action such as this. Or violence. But let’s try this first.
But why Switzerland? They have taken some climate actions, although they of course could have done more. Why not sue major offenders like India or Russia, just to name a few, who could actually make a difference to world climate? Or if you want to stay closer to Europe, sue some country that still uses coal plants, like Poland, Germany or Slovakia. It all feels quite hypocrite to me.
Switzerland is the most democratic country you can find on earth. The population has an enormous power to compell the government.
If Switzerland does too little for the environment it can not happen against the will of the population. Surely having some foreign court compell them makes them overthink their wrong choices.
Well, actually it can. For example, there was 'Popular initiative “For responsible companies – to protect people and the environment”' [0] which got voted NO because of electoral votes, even though it received the popular vote at 50.7%. Same reason as in the US: electoral votes overrepresent low density, conservative areas.
It should be a human right for people living near the equator. Wet bulb temperatures there are hot, and increases of 2+ degrees C is genuinely very dire for them.
It's easy for this to be out of sight out of mind for anyone living in a colder climate or with enough income to ensure indoors air conditioning.
This is a European re-run of the 2019 Dutch Urgenda trial on the same subject [1] and it is definitely not a good thing no matter whether you believe in a "climate catastrophe" or not. These types of trials are used as a run-around for the - dare I use the term 'democratic' - political process to get policies enacted which are only supported by a fraction of the electorate.
Thus far this tactic has been used by "progressives" for "progressive" causes so critics of the process tends to be labelled "right-wing" or some form of *-ist or *-denier so as to make them untouchable. Those who support this type of legal strong-arming of the political process would do well to contemplate how this same tactic can be used by their political opponents to force their governments to enact policies they oppose.
The democratic process is what has established the human rights conventions. These people are just using what we've established in attempt to protect their rights.
The fact that statutes and courts are used for other purposes than originally envisioned does not justify those purposes or actions. It is quite likely that this tactic will eventually be used to push through policies which go against "progressive" doctrine, some of the more likely areas for this to happen are migration and criminal justice.
Given your nick I assume you're from the USA (and/or work for Intel...) so there are already some examples of this happening in both directions, e.g. first the establishment of a federal 'right to abortion' in Roe vs. Wade which was then withdrawn when the supreme court decision on Roe vs Wade pushed abortion legislation back to the state level. The laws are in place - both on state as well as federate level - for forcing your state and federal government to restrict migration and clamp down on district attorneys who are unwilling to prosecute criminals, all it takes is for some entity to manage to get a case in a 'friendly' court. Will you see such decisions in the same light as you're portraying this decision?
The problem here does not lie in the establishment or ratification of a court to handle human rights affairs but in the equation of 'climate policy' with ´human rights'. Seen in this light many other issues can be portrayed as 'human rights', some of them far more directly than 'climate policy'. The right to self-defence is one such issue which could be taken up by an activist group to allow people to keep and bear arms for that purpose, something which is alien to most European countries but could be argued to become a necessity due to the inability of the justice system to provide an adequate level of protection from harm. Is there a human right of self-defence? If so what is to keep such a decision from being made even though the majority of political parties would never run on such a platform? Also, if such a decision were made would you see it in the same light as this one given that ____land democratically decided to put the ECHR in place?
I prefer to keep the courts out of the political discourse other than in cases where politicos violate the law of the land in which case I want them to deal with those cases swiftly and decisively. Especially in Europe where we do not elect our judges and prosecutors and as such have no means to reign in activists within the justice department (which do exist, see e.g. 'Hilda' and 'Ruben' in Sweden [1,2]) I want there to be a clear separation between the two.
I'm old enough to remember when people were protesting against international courts overriding national democracy, but that doesn't say much as it was last decade:
Readit News
And these people are from the country on earth where the population has the greatest control over their government. Switzerland isn't some rogue state, the population has legal means to force the government to do essentially whatever they want. So the human rights violation is being committed by the population themselves.
If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
It really must be dismaying to see how little anyone actually cares about the environment on a global scale, for someone who actually cares about the environment. Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.
Wether the actions have been approved by a democratic majority seems orthogonal to whether human rights have been violated (if a government performs torture on some humans it would still be a human rights issue even if there's democratic support for it).
The fact that this would imply that other countries, such as India and China, also would have similar human rights issues doesn't seem very strange either - several countries often violate human rights in the same way.
Not saying I agree with the legal case, but your explanations of why it's "insane" doesn't really hold water to me.
> This is legitimately insane. You have a court, which was created in an attempt to give legal options to victims of crimes committed by nation state and which could not be heard elsewhere. And people are suing over whatever a tiny European state doesn't do to stop environmental harm. Which may or may not even effect the people who are suing at all.
The court was created to evaluate any situation that violates the general principles of the European Convention of Human Rights. There is no rule that only those suffering an injustice is allowed to complain about it.
> And these people are from the country on earth where the population has the greatest control over their government. Switzerland isn't some rogue state, the population has legal means to force the government to do essentially whatever they want. So the human rights violation is essentially being committed by the population themselves.
The government is still the final party responsible for having policies and nation-level actions adhere to laws and conventions.
It would not be fair to sue John and Jane Doe for having voted for a possibly non-compliant government action, or for failing to push policy suggestions sufficiently for them to be voted into action. The regular population only has limited knowledge about statecraft.
> If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
India and China are not parties to the European Convention on Human Rights. Switzerland is. Whataboutism also has no relevance to the court ruling.
Personally I don't agree with the ECHR's definitions/breadth of remit, and I suspect that I am not alone. I believe it's the sort of ruling that devalues what should be an important control mechanism on protecting people from serious abuse. But, just my pov and others are free to vote in line with theirs!
It's basically the only thing we can do at this point if we want to have a planet left by 2100.
Deleted Comment
Also China is fabricating basically all your products, so of course it's only natural they also produce more pollution.
Deleted Comment
While I too find it somewhat weird that the ECHR is involved in climate regulation, I find the appeal to majority/democracy to be missing the point of constitutional legal systems, and European Convention on Human Rights is a sort of a constitution. Without independent judiciary that is not subject to the pressures by the majority (ideally), even democracy itself wouldn't survive, not to mention the rights of the minority, say people who will be displaced or will lose their livelihood due to the climate change (albeit Switzerland should be one of the countries least negative affected by the climate change).
Isn’t that fairly common? Slavery in the US, Nazi concentration camps, Rawandan ethnic cleansing…
In their effort to optimize locally, they lose globally.
a) You know the answer.
b) Last time I looked on the map, India was not in Europe.
> Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.
Either you're arguing in bad faith, or you don't understand that this might help pushing governments to take stricter measures.
There is an international court of human rights. How often was India found guilty there?
>Either you're arguing in bad faith, or you don't understand that this might help pushing governments to take stricter measures.
I am 100% convinced that there is nothing which makes you object more to climate protection than a foreign entity trying to compel the government you control to "do more".
And even if. When will India/China act? How many International court of human rights ruling will that take?
It bothers me for the same reason that some people are dismayed by attempts at compelled speech. Because it gets a problem ass backwards.
One cannot claim that inaction is a violation of human rights.
All of us have the right to just look at the world and throw our hands up in the air, and cry, and say "I just don't know what to do!". Climate change is a tragedy that makes the greatest people, the most compassionate, motivated experts freeze in fear an inaction.
What is wrong and is a blatant violation of human rights in the face of looming catastrophe is inhibiting or sabotaging action. For example, the UK government has gone out of its way to spitefully outlaw legitimate peaceful protest by environmentalists.
Complaining about inaction while failing to step up and defend rights to action is hypocritical and a passive.
> Decision of the Court > The Court began by noting that it could deal with the issues arising from climate change only within > the limits of the exercise of its competence under Article 19 (Establishment of the Court) of the > Convention, which is to ensure the observance of the engagements undertaken by the High > Contracting Parties to the Convention and its Protocol
So this is not even a news to discuss. Flagged.
However, the European Convention of Human Rights was a decision we as a larger society made, as a deliberate safe-guard against having other decisions (or lack thereof) conflict with what we considered the basic requirements for a decent human life. Unless the convention is abandoned, no society that agreed to it can decide (including inaction through indecision!) on something that conflicts with it.
I know of a certain kingdom of life that would strongly disagree
If Switzerland does too little for the environment it can not happen against the will of the population. Surely having some foreign court compell them makes them overthink their wrong choices.
[0]: https://www.ejpd.admin.ch/ejpd/de/home/themen/abstimmungen/v...
Are you saying that human rights cannot be violated if a democratic decision was made beforehand?
Deleted Comment
The impacts of climate change are going to be seen and felt initially by people who had literally no say in the matter.
So no, human rights and climate change are completely intertwined.
It's easy for this to be out of sight out of mind for anyone living in a colder climate or with enough income to ensure indoors air conditioning.
Thus far this tactic has been used by "progressives" for "progressive" causes so critics of the process tends to be labelled "right-wing" or some form of *-ist or *-denier so as to make them untouchable. Those who support this type of legal strong-arming of the political process would do well to contemplate how this same tactic can be used by their political opponents to force their governments to enact policies they oppose.
[1] https://www.urgenda.nl/en/themas/climate-case/
Given your nick I assume you're from the USA (and/or work for Intel...) so there are already some examples of this happening in both directions, e.g. first the establishment of a federal 'right to abortion' in Roe vs. Wade which was then withdrawn when the supreme court decision on Roe vs Wade pushed abortion legislation back to the state level. The laws are in place - both on state as well as federate level - for forcing your state and federal government to restrict migration and clamp down on district attorneys who are unwilling to prosecute criminals, all it takes is for some entity to manage to get a case in a 'friendly' court. Will you see such decisions in the same light as you're portraying this decision?
I prefer to keep the courts out of the political discourse other than in cases where politicos violate the law of the land in which case I want them to deal with those cases swiftly and decisively. Especially in Europe where we do not elect our judges and prosecutors and as such have no means to reign in activists within the justice department (which do exist, see e.g. 'Hilda' and 'Ruben' in Sweden [1,2]) I want there to be a clear separation between the two.
[1] https://mrrs.se/ordf_blog/hilda-ruben-stridet-mot-grundlagen...
[2] https://www.advokatsamfundet.se/om-advokatsamfundet/tidigare...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...
Many of the same talking points came up again immediately in the form of Brexit and the various European Courts.
Also, I get the impression (from up to 9 time zones away) that this kind of thing is also part of the power struggle in the US between states and DC.