More than 600 young people, including climate activist Greta Thunberg, sued the Swedish state on Friday for its measures deemed insufficient in the face of climate issues, a first in the Scandinavian kingdom. “No climate legal process of this magnitude has ever been conducted before the Swedish legal system,” Ida Edling, a member of the Aurora committee, told AFP.
The complaint, symbolically delivered during a demonstration in the Swedish capital, was already sent digitally to a court in Stockholm on Friday, the committee said. The complaint has been in the works for nearly two years but comes as Sweden’s new right-wing government is coming under heavy criticism over its lack of climate ambition.
States increasingly sued
If the initiative is a first before Swedish justice, Sweden had already been summoned with 32 other countries before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by six young Portuguese in 2020 there too to attack its lack of action. assumed against global warming. “If we win, then there will be a judgment that the Swedish state is obliged to do its part in the global measures necessary to maintain the 1.5 degree objective,” explained Ida Edling.
In recent years, more and more organizations and citizens are turning to the courts to denounce what they see as government inaction on climate issues. In a case that has become emblematic, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered the government in December 2019 to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020.
In France, a similar affair, the “Affair of the Century”, brought more than two million citizens to recognize the failure of the State in the fight against global warming. In a report on Tuesday, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) pointed out that the country’s average temperature has risen by nearly two degrees since the end of the 19th century, twice as fast as the global average. The snow cover already lasts two weeks less, with an increase in precipitation in the Scandinavian country.