Is climate inaction a human rights violation?

“There had been a violation of the right to respect for private and family life.”

So said the European Court of Human Rights, as it handed down a ruling on Tuesday in favor of a group of women alleging the Swiss government failed to protect their health amid worsening climate change-related heatwaves.

The “Swiss grandmothers” (minimum age: 64) had initially sailed up the Rhine in 2020 to deliver their complaint to the Strasbourg-based court – after being dismissed by the legal system in their own country.

That system failed to “take into consideration the compelling scientific evidence concerning climate change,” or to take the case the women brought before it “seriously,” the ECHR said.

Now, effects of Tuesday’s decision could trickle down to dozens of countries in Europe. One expert described its impact as “huge.”

It may yet prove to be a decisive moment for human rights-based climate litigation, which has been steadily gaining momentum in recent years. It will almost certainly put the many countries failing to hit their climate targets on notice.

Switzerland has not complied with its duties under the European Convention on Human Rights related to climate change, the ECHR said – there are “critical gaps” in domestic regulation, coupled with a failure to achieve greenhouse gas emission reduction goals.

“The Swiss authorities had not acted in time and in an appropriate way,” the court said.

The ruling comes as impacts of the climate crisis mount.

Global temperatures last year smashed the previous record by a huge margin, and seem poised to start breaching a critical level beyond which conditions are expected to become increasingly catastrophic.

Scientists have pegged the odds of another heat record this year at one in three.

Still, not all human rights-based climate litigation has succeeded.

Two other related cases brought before the ECHR were dismissed on Tuesday, on procedural grounds.

One of those cases had been brought by a group of young people from Portugal, after wildfires intensified by a warming climate made that country, which constitutes about 2% of European Union territory, home to more than half of the bloc’s total burned area.

They alleged that those fires – and the health risks and crippling anxiety that come with them – were the result of a failure to act on climate change in Portugal and 32 other countries. The ECHR ruled on Tuesday that their case was inadmissible, because they hadn’t first pursued it in their native Portugal.

The UN Human Rights Office clearly states that climate change threatens the enjoyment of life, food, and health.

But following through on legal action compelling respect for those rights can be a lengthy process.

Still, Clémentine Baldon, an attorney who’s represented plaintiffs in climate litigation, had predicted to the World Economic Forum in 2022 that the number of human rights-related claims would “continue to increase” – particularly if the ECHR were to rule in favor of plaintiffs like the “Swiss grandmothers.”

(Baldon represented a plaintiff in the “Case of the Century” in France, which held that country’s government liable in 2021 for missing its climate goals).

According to the Global Climate Change Litigation database, 146 human rights-based cases have been brought against governments outside of the US to date (claims within the US are categorized differently).

Many of those cases relate to environmental health, while others have been tied to climate migration, or have been filed on behalf of Indigenous groups.

In 2022, some of Baldon’s clients filed a complaint with the ECHR over a 1990s-era treaty requiring governments to compensate energy companies and investors if public policies cut into their profits – including policies designed to combat climate change.

On Tuesday, one of the Swiss women victorious at the ECHR seemed incredulous. “We keep asking our lawyers, ‘Is that right?’,” she said.

“And they tell us: ‘It’s the most you could have had. The biggest victory possible.’”