With Swiss Seniors the Climate-Litigation Movement Chalks up Another Hollow Victory

Abstract With the European Court of Human Rights’ April 2024 decision, the climate-litigation movement might feel confident that it has demonstrated that a state’s mitigation policy is subject to human rights law. In fact, all that it has managed to do is to convince the Strasbourg court to overextend itself and discredit itself by concocting a position that defies not only law but logic. The human rights framing is too narrow for the problem of climate change. It focuses on the comfort of one particular species, ignoring the rest. Worse, it is irrelevant to the problem, as the reality of it is that each and every member of this species is causing climate change, not their governments, so the issue cannot be presented as one of protecting individuals from the power of government – and therefore not one that engages human rights law.