By Willy Blackmore
Overview: A group of Swiss senior women sued their government over climate change and won, forging a path Black communities could follow.
A group of Swiss women who are disproportionately at risk to the effects of climate change won a landmark legal case today when a European court agreed that their human rights are being violated because their government has not done enough to reduce carbon emissions.
The victory for KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, is the kind of ruling any number of groups around the world and in the U.S., including a diverse group of California kids, are hoping to win as suing local and national governments becomes a growing form of climate actio
While the legal jurisdiction might be half a world away, a similar case could be made for so many Black Americans. Like the Swiss women, Black communities nationwide are at outsized risk of harm from climate change due to centuries of systematic and structural racism.
If the KlimaSiniorinnen are having their human rights violated, then it’s logical to conclude Black Americans on the front lines of climate change certainly are, too.
The KlimaSeniorinnen argued before the European Court of Human Rights that, since they are at higher risk during heatwaves, the Swiss government has violated their human rights by not sufficiently addressing the climate crisis.
It’s a major win for Europeans, as the case creates a legal precedent that is binding across all 46 countries that have signed onto the European Convention on Human Rights. While the court threw out two other climate-related cases — one brought by a group of young people from Portugal, and the other by the former mayor of a flood-prone town in France — the Swiss victory will likely bring a new rush of similar lawsuits from across the European Union.
Because the ruling is binding, Switzerland is now legally required to do more to reduce its carbon emissions. Like many countries, including the U.S., the Swiss have failed to meet their own targets and could be subject to further legal pressure if it doesn’t do so.
If, suddenly, countries across Europe are ordered to actually cut emissions as a result of copy-cat lawsuits, it would benefit everyone simply in terms of reducing the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere. But when it comes to U.S. lawsuits over climate change, the KlimaSeniorinnen victory only really supplies the moral support that comes from showing that someone, somewhere can win such a case.
Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told the New York Times that the ruling was unlikely to change anything for American cases. But he also said that “the idea that climate change impaired fundamental rights resonated throughout the cases” in the EU and the US — which is at least maybe something.
This article was originally published in Word In Black .
