The role of the European Court of Human Rights in the context of climate litigation

Abstract

This paper analyses the development of environmental protection through climate litigation from the perspective of the European Convention on Human Rights. Indeed, in the absence of an explicitly recognised right to the environment in the European Convention, the author examines the evolution of the European Court of Human Rights’ case law (both the original individual dimension and the more recent collective dimension) in order to analyse, through climate litigation, the apparent paradigm shift towards a right to a healthy climate and global justice. In this evolution, the analysis the synergies in climate litigation between the European Court and other international bodies (universal ones such as the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, or regional ones such as the European Committee of Social Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights) are taken into account. Finally, the study also considers the complex constitutional reception at national level of the European Court’s case law, due to the tensions between the traditional ‘anthropocentric’ approach and the more recent ‘ecocentric’ approach.