On April 29, the country's Supreme Court announced that some provisions of the 2019 climate change act were unconstitutional and"incompatible with fundamental rights," because they lacked a detailed plan for reducing emissions and placed the burden for future climate action on young people.
Peter Altmaier, the German minister for energy and the economy called the court's finding"significant" and a"historic decision for climate and the rights of young people." Mark Clarke, a partner at the international law firm White & Case, says that not only are there more climate cases being brought forward, there's also a shift in the way they are being framed."The most significant trend is the pivot away from claims for damages as a result of the physical impacts of climate change, towards rights-based claims," he said.
"The [German Constitutional] court was not so much talking about the impacts of climate change on young people, but the impact of mitigation measures," said Gerry Liston, the head of climate litigation at Global Legal Action Network, or GLAN. "These kids, they found their voice, they went to the streets and they were there, shouting in front of parliaments, and when they couldn't go to the streets anymore because of social distancing and Covid, they went to court," she told CNN.
"In the tobacco litigation cases, you had quite few successful cases to begin with, before the tide turned and the litigation started to go the other way," he said. Crosland said the trend in climate cases began to emerge in 2018, when three key events helped shift the public perception of the scale and urgency of the crisis.
Clarke, the White & Case lawyer, added that legal precedent is building as the number of cases rises. Advances in climate science are also helping, he said. She said the lawsuit was just a logical continuation of the climate protests she helped to organize across Germany."We found out that we had been striking for 125 weeks and the government was somewhat resistant to the idea that it might be actually their job to protect our future through the action today, and so I felt we need to do everything possible to change the course of things."
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