07 September 2021
World Lawyers’ Pledge on Climate Action
The world is facing climate emergency, one of a series of overlapping and mutually reinforcing environmental crises. In 2017, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, urging the world to take immediate action against the current trajectory of catastrophic climate change. We, as concerned lawyers, have heard the world scientists’ call, and believe it is time for the legal community at large to organize and join the global fight against climate change. Continue reading >>
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28 July 2021
Lessons from the French Citizens’ Climate Convention
On July 6, the French Prime Minister announced that the government was abandoning the bill to enshrine in the Constitution the preservation of the environment. He invoked the Senate's inertia to justify renouncing the bill, which needed to be adopted in the same terms by the two houses of parliament. The climate referendum that had been announced by the President of the Republic in December 2020 was thus abandoned. The decision was not a surprise, as many doubted the political feasibility or the actual willingness to implement it. Continue reading >>
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07 July 2021
The New EU Climate Law
On 30 June 2021, the European Parliament and the Council signed the EU Climate Law. The Law has drawn a lot of attention, stirred not least because of its head-line grabbing name. Was it merely meant to be a symbolic law to enshrine the EU’s climate objectives into law and celebrate the EU Green Deal? Or was it meant to be a new governance framework that changes the way decisions are taken on EU and Member State level? Continue reading >>
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04 July 2021
The Grande Synthe Saga Continues
France’s highest administrative court ruled that the French government had failed to take sufficient action to mitigate climate change and ordered it to take additional measures to redress that failure. The Grande Synthe II decision of 1 July 2021 follows the findings by the Conseil d’État in a previous decision that France’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets constitute legal obligations that are enforceable against the state. However, how, and when to redress France’s failure have been, to a broad extent, left to the discretion of the government. This all but ensures the Grande Synthe saga to continue. Continue reading >>
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15 June 2021
The Courts Strike Back
The Shell case, decided by the Hague District Court on 26 May 2021, is part of a growing body of climate cases. What the Shell case does is that it liberates the political-decision maker from the suffocating grip of investor state dispute settlement mechanisms, in particular the mechanism under the Energy Charter Treaty. Continue reading >>15 June 2021
The Power of Open Norms
In a judgement of 26 May, the District Court of the Hague found that Royal Dutch Shell has an “individual responsibility” to limit its carbon emissions by at least 45 percent by 2030. Notable about the ruling is the unwritten standard of care functioning as an open norm, facilitating the accountability of private power. The openness of legal categories not only entails a potential to drive forward social change, but it also implicitly highlights the political role and nature of private law. Continue reading >>28 May 2021
Shell’s Responsibility for Climate Change
On 26 May 2021, the District Court of the Hague rendered a judgment in the case Milieudefensie v Royal Dutch Shell that can rightly be called revolutionary. This is the first judgment of its kind in which a multinational corporation is held responsible, in part based on international law, for its contribution to climate change. Continue reading >>
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30 April 2021
Ok, Boomer
On control loops, climate change and the Federal Constitutional Court Continue reading >>
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30 April 2021
Judges for Future
The judgment of 29 April 2021 quashing parts of the Climate Protection Act (CPA) has made history. Not only because the First Senate of the BVerfG put an end to deferring the reduction of greenhouse gasses to the future, or at least to the next government. But because this turn to the future came in the form of a turn to international law and institutions. It is precisely by relying on international law that the court overcomes the counter-majoritarian difficulty commonly tantalizing climate litigation and human rights law generally. The most astonishing fact is, however, that the court entirely avoids the tragic choice between supposedly undemocratic international commitments and the democratic legislature. I argue that it does so by approaching constitutional law in a decidedly postcolonial perspective. Continue reading >>29 April 2021