Landmark Climate Change Case Against 32 States to be Heard at the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights Today

The Grand Chamber holds its final hearing in Duarte Agostinho & Others v Portugal & Others (App no. 39371/20) on 27 September 2023

Josh Jackson is appearing in Strasbourg before the Court as part of the counsel team, led by Alison Macdonald KC of Essex Court Chambers, and instructed the Global Legal Action Network.

The team represent six young people are from areas in Portugal badly affected by forest fires, heatwaves and other extreme weather conditions. The six youth-Applicants argue that European States are violating their rights to life, freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment, and private life by failing to cut their emissions fast enough. The hearing will be unprecedented in scale, involving the largest number of states ever brought before any court.

The six youth-Applicants base their case on the detrimental impacts that climate change is already having on their physical and mental health, as well as the worsening impacts that they will experience in future.

The case is the first climate change case ever filed with the ECtHR; it is one of three currently before the Grand Chamber which only hears cases of exceptional importance. Only approximately 0.03% of cases before the ECtHR end up before the Grand Chamber.

The Global Legal Action Network’s press release can be found here.

Reported by: The BBC, The Guardian, Financial Times, Associated Press, Al Jazeera, Reuters

A judgment in the youth-Applicants’ favour could result in all 32 Respondent countries having to rapidly accelerate their climate action (i.e. through emissions reductions). In addition, as rulings of the ECtHR are influential in cases before domestic courts in Europe, this judgment would also give claimants taking future climate cases at the national level a much stronger basis on which to argue their cases.

A ruling in the case is expected in the first half of 2024.

According to one of the six youth-Applicants Martim Duarte Agostinho:

“Without urgent action to cut emissions, where I live will soon become an unbearable furnace. It hurts me to know that European governments have the power to do so much more to do their part in preventing this and are choosing not to. Our message to the judges on 27th September will be simple - please make these governments do what it takes for us to have a liveable future.”

Gerry Liston, senior lawyer with the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) who is leading the case which is supporting the youth-Applicants, said:

European governments’ climate policies are consistent with a catastrophic 3 degrees of global heating this century. For the brave youth-Applicants, that is a life sentence of heat extremes which are unimaginable even by today’s rapidly deteriorating standards. The European Court of Human Rights was set up following the horrors of World War 2 to hold European governments to account for failing to protect human rights. Never has there been as urgent a need for the Court to do so than in this case.