“Landmark ruling” is one way to describe a travesty of justice, but it is highly likely to appear in media reports on the blinkered verdict rendered by the European Court of Human Rights this week.
In its review of a case brought by 2,000 elderly women, the ECHR found that the Swiss government can be held liable for violating their human rights. Why? Because Bern has made what the institution regards as inadequate contributions to mitigating the effects of global warming.
Via CNN:
The court ruled that the Swiss government had violated some of the women’s human rights due to “critical gaps” in its national legislation to reduce planet-heating emissions, as well as a failure to meet past climate targets.
This amounted to a breach of the women’s rights to effective protection from the “the serious adverse effects of climate change on lives, health, well-being and quality of life,” the court said in a statement.
“It marks the first time the court has ruled on climate litigation,” CNN continued. “There is no right of appeal, and the judgment is legally binding.”
Well, that’s good and settled then, isn’t it? By virtue of its failure to deindustrialize to the subjective satisfaction of a collection of bureaucrats in Strasbourg, Switzerland can be officially deemed a human-rights abuser. Its conduct renders the Swiss government morally equivalent to pariahs like Russia, Syria, and Iran. After all, can anyone really say that imprisoning political dissidents is worse than allowing gasoline-powered vehicles to traverse the roadways unmolested?
The ECHR’s utter lack of any capacity for discretion is enough to make you question the utility of admittance into almost any multilateral talk shop that convinces itself it has something approximating plenary power. At some point, the nations that subject themselves to the judgments rendered by the occupants of toothless sinecures will reclaim the sovereignty they’ve sacrificed. It’s unfortunate that today is not yet that day.