Swedish activists said Friday a government agency had given them permission to sue the state for infringing their human rights by failing to tackle climate change.
Activist groups around the world are increasingly looking to the courts to force governments and corporations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and better protect the environment.
The Aurora group has been trying for years to bring a case in Sweden but it had previously fallen foul of legal technicalities.
The Supreme Court turfed out an earlier attempt last year because it was brought on behalf of an individual, but said in its ruling that an “association” might be able to bring a case.
Aurora filed a new suit under its own name in February and the Chancellor of Justice (JK) — a government agency that handles claims against the state — agreed it could go ahead.
“A Swedish district court will, for the first time ever, have to decide whether Sweden’s overall climate efforts are sufficient to protect human rights from the effects of the climate crisis, or whether they are unlawfully inadequate,” the association said on Friday.
The JK filed documents in Stockholm’s district court on June 18 saying Aurora “has the right to bring the action” and get a review of whether the Swedish government has breached the European Convention on Human Rights.
The agency stressed however that allowing the case to go ahead did not mean the state was at fault.
The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency as well as the OECD warned last year that Sweden was at risk of not reaching its own goal of net zero emissions by 2045.
In a landmark April 2024 decision, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Switzerland was not doing enough to tackle climate change, the first country ever to be condemned by an international tribunal for not taking sufficient action to curb global warming.
In December 2019, the Dutch supreme court ordered the government to slash greenhouse gases by at least 25 percent by 2020 in another landmark case brought by an environmental group.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
