The Council of Elders for Climate Protection says it has more than 2,500 members
The Swiss Association of Women Climate Elders scored a historic victory on Tuesday after Europe’s top human rights court accused Switzerland of not doing enough to combat global warming.
Here are some facts about a group of Swiss seniors who helped the European Court of Human Rights condemn a country for the first time for failing to take action on climate change.
Over 64 years old
The association was founded in August 2016 by a small group of women of retirement age, united by concerns about climate change, to demand stronger action to meet the goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The agreement sets targets for governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of ideally limiting global temperature increases to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“If everyone did what Switzerland does today, global warming could reach 3 degrees Celsius by 2100,” the Council of Elders for Climate Protection said on its website.
“Keeping temperatures below 1.5 degrees is decisive to avoid more serious threats to human rights.”
Today, the association says it has more than 2,500 members, all women over 64 living in Switzerland.
Their average age is said to be 73 years.
“Older women are particularly vulnerable to the effects of high temperatures,” the association said in explaining its membership criteria.
At the same time, it has not imposed the same restrictions on its roughly 1,200 supporters.
long journey
The organization has advocated for climate protection to be considered a human right, saying that increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves caused by climate protection “pose real and serious risks to our lives and physical and mental health.”
But the lawsuits it filed in Switzerland were all dismissed.
The Council of Elders for Climate Protection appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in 2020 after the Swiss Supreme Court failed to hold a hearing.
The court finally ruled on Tuesday that the Swiss government had violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees “the right to respect for private and family life.”
Cordelia Bahr, a lawyer for the Swiss association, said the court “has established that climate protection is a human right”.
“This is a huge victory for us and a legal precedent for all Council of Europe member states,” she said.
a librarian and a counselor
The association has two co-presidents.
Anne Mahrer, a librarian from Geneva, has been committed to environmental protection, first as part of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s, according to a list of famous Swiss citizens published annually by the weekly Illustre.
She later entered politics and became a Green Party MP.
At her side is Rosemarie Vidler-Vardi, an educational and marriage counselor in Basel.
As a young mother, she became involved in the environmental and feminist movements.
In a profile published by Switzerland Abroad, she said she felt motivated to take action after the “harrowing” Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 and a fire at a warehouse storing chemicals near Basel that same year .
greenpeace support
Since its founding, the Climate Presbyterian Council has received strong support from Greenpeace Switzerland, which has guaranteed its legal costs for many years.
Since its founding in 2016, the association has raised more than 122,000 Swiss francs ($135,000) in fees, according to its website.
Greenpeace spokesman Matthias Schlegel told The Times that Tuesday’s verdict was “obviously a huge relief to people who have been working on this case for many years.”
“It was a very emotional moment. I even saw some of my colleagues shed tears,” he said.
Greenpeace and Climate Change Council now plan to take the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, with hearings expected to begin early next year.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
