This is a linkpost for https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/29/historic-german-ruling-says-climate-goals-not-tough-enough
"The judges ruled that young people’s “fundamental rights to a human future” were threatened and that the law in its current state jeopardised their freedom because the goals set were too focused on dates too far in the future. It said that it was only possible to reduce the rise in average global temperatures to between 1.5C and 2C – as set out in the 2015 Paris agreement – with “more urgent and shorter term measures”.
“The challenged rules violate the freedoms of the complainants, some of whom are still very young,” the judges said in a statement. They added: “Virtually every freedom is potentially affected by these future emission reduction obligations because almost every area of human life is associated with the emission of greenhouse gases and is therefore threatened by drastic restrictions after 2030.”"
While precedent might not matter that much in civil law countries like germany, and I don't know a lot about the details of the respective legislation, this is evidence that courts might rule in favour of "longtermist" positions based on rights-based arguments and could provide an interesting blueprint for advocacy for in and for the future.
I also thought this was pretty interesting. Here is what I wrote on some Slack workspace:
I think these news from Germany are kind of wild (though probably not unprecedented internationally), and quite possibly interesting for 'longtermist policy', rights of future generations, etc., more broadly:
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/germany-must-further-tighten-climate-change-law-top-court-rules-2021-04-29/
Note that this is from Germany's constitutional court. This both means that there is no appeal to this ruling, and that in a sense the statement is quite strong: according the court, failure to properly specify climate policy for the 2030--2050 period is unconstitutional.
Specifically, I think it's interesting that:
The court's reasoning is also interesting:
So basically the government is violating young people's basic rights today by leaving too much room for potential future curtailments of their freedom.
(From the court's English press release.)
It's also interesting that some complainants "live in Bangladesh and Nepal".
(I haven't read the Reuters article. In my experience at least German media are notoriously bad at accurately reporting the constitutional court's rulings. I recommend reading the court's English press release, or to machine translate the full ruling -- currently only available in German -- if you wanted to know more.)
This was a really interesting decision, thanks for highlighting it here! In the meantime it was followed by other courts with similar cases in the Netherlands and Australia.
Also, for people interested in a legal analysis of the decision, together with my colleague Renan Araújo from the Legal Priorities Project I wrote a blog post on the decision for a UK blog.