STRASBOURG: Cases opened Wednesday before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against Switzerland and France over alleged failings to protect the environment.
The case against Switzerland is filed after a complaint by an association of elderly people, who call themselves the Club of Climate Seniors, concerned with the effects of global warming on their health and living conditions, the ECHR said.
They accuse the Swiss authorities of many climate change failings, which they say violates the government’s duty to protect life, families, and homes.
Bruna Molinari, 81, a resident of southern Tessin canton, said that they have been fighting for years against the pollution. He hoped that the court would find in their favour so that Switzerland would do better than it has done so far.
Greenpeace Switzerland supports case
The average age is 73 in the club, which Greenpeace Switzerland supports.
Nearly 50 of its 2,000 members were expected to attend the hearing.
Alain Chablais, the counsel of the Swiss government, told the court that it was baseless to suggest or claim that Switzerland is doing nothing.
He added that the ECHR had no business becoming the forum where national climate protection policy is decided.
But Jessica Simor, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said that her clients were already suffering the negative effects of climate change that the government was not doing enough to stop.
She added that temperatures rose twice as quickly in the Alpine country as the global average.
She said that heat kills. It increases the risks of kidney diseases, asthma attacks, and cardiovascular problems and causes especially acute symptoms in elderly people, especially in elderly women.
The case against France was brought by Grande-Synthe’s former mayor Damien Careme, who also argues that the government has failed to do its duty to protect life by taking insufficient measures to prevent climate change.
When Careme was mayor, he brought his case to the country’s judiciary on behalf of his town but also on his own behalf, stating that climate change was intensifying the risk of his home being flooded.
The highest administrative court in France ruled in favour of his town against the central government in 2021 but threw out the individual case he brought, which he then took to the ECHR.
