The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) could rule that governments must protect people from climate change.
Next week judges from the Strasbourg court will decide whether people’s human rights have been breached by the failure of governments to protect them from the alleged harmful effects of climate change.
The Telegrapgh reports : If they rule in favour of three cases claiming their rights have been breached, it would mean that individuals could seek redress with the Strasbourg court and compensation if their governments failed to take sufficient measures to prevent their citizens suffering the consequences of climate change.
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The cases have prompted a backlash from the U.K. Government whose lawyer Sudhanshu Swaroop KC told the court in one of the cases that it was effectively turning the court into a legislator.
He said the complainants were “asking the court to act as legislators rather than judges and to legislate for a global challenge without having global jurisdiction”.
Sarah Dines, the former Home Office Minister who has called for the U.K. to leave the Strasbourg court, described it as a “yet another attempted ideological power grab on the part of a self-selecting and self-serving elite out of touch with reality”.
The legal challenge is based on the claim that failure to tackle climate change sufficiently to protect the public amounts to a breach of article 2, the right to life, and article 8, the right to a family life.
