Human rights and climate change: a blow for democracy
This week's judgement from the European Court for Human Rights is a major attack on our ability to decide the UK's policies and laws.
Earlier this week, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg declared that climate change is a human-rights issue. The Court ruled that the Swiss government had failed to protect the human rights of a group of older women by not protecting them from climate change, in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It’s a daft but potentially dangerous judgement.
Once upon a time, most people would have associated the idea of ‘human rights’ with imprisoned dissidents or oppressed minorities. In essence, human rights were posed as a way of getting protection from governments. But this judgement suggests that human rights includes protection by governments – and that the best people to decide whether such protection should be offered are judges, not voters. The case against the Swiss government comes after a referendum on Net Zero, in which proposed policies were rejected by Swiss voters.
Indeed, the barrister for the Swiss plaintiffs, Jessica Simor KC, has declared that referendums are ‘problematic’ and that democracy involves certain rights ‘irrespective of what the majority decides’. It may come as a shock to many that ‘what the majority decides’ is not what matters anymore, but rather what judges decide.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as they say in Strasbourg. As Luke Gittos, author of Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, noted in an article for spiked five years ago, the concept of human rights always had an underlying, anti-democratic impulse behind it: ‘The existence of a human-rights framework owes everything to the attempts of postwar elites to centralise economic and political control over the European continent and to manage the democratic will of European peoples.’
The European Convention on Human Rights has become a justification for judicial activism for years, but this judgement breaks new ground. It’s bad enough that all the big parties in Westminster agree on the need to aim for Net Zero. It’s even worse when the Climate Change Act has been used by litigious environmental groups to block new infrastructure based on that drive to reach zero emissions.
But this judgement – which cannot be appealed - is a major blow for democracy. As long as the UK remains a signatory to the Convention and abides by the decisions of the human-rights court, decisions about Net Zero will ultimately be removed from the democratic domain altogether.
Read on:
The absurd ruling that shows lawyers and judges are mounting an insurgency and we MUST quit the ECHR, Frank Furedi, Daily Mail, 10 April 2024
Is climate change really a human rights matter?, Andrew Tettenborn, Spectator, 9 April 2024
Watch Academy of Ideas videos on human rights
Luke Gittos introduces his book, Human Rights - Illusory Freedoms.
Should we leave the European Convention on Human Rights?
Debate at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023.
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