Climate change and the European Court of Human Rights

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has established case law on environmental matters ¹ and extraterritorial human rights obligations ² that provides guiding principles for climate change litigation. This chapter analyses the suitability of the ECtHR for climate change and human rights litigation from three perspectives. The first perspective seeks inspiration from the Urgenda case to assess what theoretical opportunities are available to establish climate change liability before the ECtHR for a single state towards its citizens (territorial liability). ³ The second perspective analyses how a single state could be held liable to individuals residing outside the territoriality of the responsible state (extraterritorial liability). The third perspective concerns the possibilities of establishing the shared responsibility of several states. ⁴