Why is the Irish Government opposing a landmark case by young climate campaigners?

On September 27th, a landmark hearing took place before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in a case brought by six Portuguese children and young adults against 32 states, including Ireland. It is the first case related to climate change filed with the ECtHR.

The six young applicants point to how they are being increasingly confined indoors by worsening heat extremes and face a future of deadly month-long 40-degree heatwaves. The toll this is taking on their mental health is also central to their case. Essentially, their claim is that the respondent states are violating their human rights because their climate policies put global warming on course for a catastrophic 3 degrees or worse within their lifetimes.

The severity of the harms the applicants face has already been recognised by the ECtHR. After the case was filed, the court took the unprecedented step of introducing its own question on whether their right to be free from torture, inhuman and degrading treatment is being violated. The court has found violations of other rights in many cases involving harm to the natural environment but it has never even considered the applicability of this right in such a case (which is why it was not originally raised by the applicants).

Of all respondent states, Ireland has made the lengthiest written submissions, forcefully opposing every argument of the applicants. This includes their very uncontroversial claim that their right to privacy and family life is affected by climate change. It is well established that a violation of this right can result from interference with a person’s quality of life, without any harm to health.

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While some respondents conceded the applicability of this right, Ireland did not. Instead, it claimed that the harms the applicants face “cannot be said to be more significant than the environmental hazards inherent to life in a modern city”. Naturally, the applicants are horrified by this claim, which displays the very kind of “callous disregard” for suffering that the ECtHR has found in other contexts to constitute inhuman and degrading treatment. Their reaction reflects the finding of a Lancet study on climate anxiety that failure by governments to take the climate crisis seriously is itself a “chronic stressor” for young people.

Ireland’s claims as to the ambition of its emissions targets are equally remarkable. It is the only respondent to have engaged an expert in the case. It engaged two. One, Oxford professor Myles Allen, claimed that achieving its targets “would potentially make Ireland the first developed economy to end its contribution of territorial emissions to ongoing global warming”. The conclusion relies on treating reductions of methane emissions as having a “global cooling” effect. Professor Allen’s views in this area are described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “contested”.

Based on a further report prepared by University College Cork professor Brian Ó Gallachóir, Ireland claimed that its 2030 target to reduce emissions by 51 per cent below 2018 levels is “one of the most ambitious short-term targets globally, second only to Denmark[’s]”. The State’s position was arrived at by converting the 2030 targets of other countries to a percentage of their 2018 emissions levels and then comparing them. The claim rests entirely on the fact that, while other countries’ emissions have been declining in recent decades, Ireland’s continued to rise to what the Climate Change Advisory Council described in 2018 as “disturbing” levels.

Also absent from Ireland’s submissions was any reference to the recent reports of the Environmental Protection Agency highlighting how far off course Ireland is from its 2030 target.

Ireland’s economical approach to the truth about its climate policies, along with its trivialisation of the harm experienced by the young applicants, indicates that the Government has adopted a win-at-any-cost approach to defending this case. The unique extent of its zeal was further demonstrated when Ireland became the only state to make oral arguments as a “Third-Party Intervener” in another climate case brought by a group of elderly women against Switzerland which was heard by the ECtHR in March. As in the Portuguese youth case, it argued that governments’ climate policies are none of the court’s business.

Governments are entitled to resist efforts to hold them legally accountable. That is the nature of litigation. But with the climate crisis intensifying so alarmingly, the exceptionally hostile approach of the Irish Government to climate cases before the ECtHR should concern us all.

Gerry Liston is a senior lawyer with the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and has been working since 2017 with the Portuguese young people in pursuing their case. The submissions of the Irish government in the case are available at youth4climatejustice.org/case-documents