A group of young activists have succeeded in having the US state of Montana condemned for climate inaction.
The judgment will not only force Montana to take real measures to change its environmental approach: for the plaintiffs, it is above all a symbolic decision, as well as an example to follow and reproduce elsewhere, in the USA and in the world. . They have been helped in this by a legal firm specializing in this type of case, and which anticipates an increasing number of similar decisions in the future.
A symbolic victory
Last June, a court in Montana considered the case filed by sixteen people, who blamed the state’s inaction on the environment for having serious effects on their health, but also on other parties. of their lives. The particularity of these complainants is their age: the oldest is indeed 22 years old, when the youngest is 5 years old.
This Monday, the judge ended up giving them reason, considering that they had provided enough evidence to support their case, which explained, among other things, that the State had violated “their constitutional right to a healthy and clean environment”in particular by encouraging the use of fossil fuels without taking sufficient measures to preserve the environment.
It should be noted that the plaintiffs did not ask for any damages, but for a change in the system. In particular, a law was targeted which simply prohibited taking into account the environmental impacts of a project linked to fossil fuels when validating it.
For these young activists, this is only a first step, and they hope that it will be emulated beyond the borders of the State, but also of the country. They were helped in their process by Our Children’s Trust, a legal firm that specializes in this type of business. For Julia Olson, one of its leaders, “other similar judgments should occur in the future”.
Source : CNet
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