A historic human-rights verdict By Hugo Miller and Olivia Rudgard

LAWFARE GONE SERIOUSLY WRONG: : “Everybody is impacted by climate change in one way or another,” she says. “But the more serious and grave the harm, the more compelling it is for a court.”

A historic human-rights verdict

By Hugo Miller and Olivia Rudgard

The seeds of this week’s victory by an association of elderly women at the European Court of Human Rights were sown in the heat of summer 2003.

That year, a heat wave killed more than 70,000 people across Europe, most of them elderly women. Zurich-based lawyer Cordelia Baehr, now 43, was attending law school at the time, but in 2016 she had an “aha” moment informed in part by the heat wave’s impacts: Research has shown that elderly women are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, and that extreme heat is exacerbated by climate change.  

“That’s when I came up with the idea of protecting older women,” Baehr says, “based on statistics that the risk of dying from extreme heat was far greater to women than men.” 

In August 2016, Baehr and about 270 pioneering members of KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, which loosely translates as Senior Women for Climate Protection Switzerland, held their inaugural meeting. 

Almost eight years after that confab, the women made legal history. On April 9, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the “Swiss Confederation had failed to comply with its duties” concerning climate change and had violated the plaintiffs’ rights to respect for private and family life. The verdict carries outsized importance because decisions by the court are binding across all 46 member states of the Council of Europe.

“The court recognized that climate change affects human rights now and in the future and that, as a result, countries need to adopt science-based targets to limit dangerous climate change,” says Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network. 

Members of KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz outside the European Court of Human Rights on April 9. Photographer: Ronald Wittek/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

The victory didn’t come easy. Three months after KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz’s first meeting with Baehr, the group submitted a request to the Swiss Federal Office of the Environment to correct the course of its climate policies. That request was dismissed in 2017, as were two subsequent appeals. Crucially, though, that cleared the way for the women to take their case to the European Human Rights Court, which they did in 2020.

Baehr’s decision to zero in on her clients’ vulnerabilities proved a winning one, says Kelly Matheson, a human rights lawyer and deputy director of climate litigation at Our Children’s Trust.

Elisabeth Stern, 76, has been a member of KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz since 2016 and now sits on its board. An ethnologist who has taught in California, Switzerland and Zimbabwe, she says the group’s intention has always been to use medical facts to push for tangible change.

“When I joined in 2016, the narrative was, ‘Why don’t you sit back and knit something?’” she says. “But I knew that they might be frail in body but were sharp in mind.” 

The 2003 heat wave in Europe killed more than 72,000 people, according to United Nations figures; in France alone, the excess mortality rates for women were 75% higher than for men. At the time, temperatures topping 41C (106F) in Switzerland and France were seen as extreme. Now the mercury regularly climbs into the low 40s in European hotspots. Last summer, temperatures hit 48.8C in Sicily, shattering records. 

That incontrovertible trajectory is part of what pushed Baehr forward. While the world might have been surprised by this week’s verdict, she says she was “quite confident” the ECHR would side with their claim that Switzerland was failing its senior citizens. 

“The climate crisis is real, it’s there, it’s urgent and has the greatest impact on human rights you can imagine,” she says. “If they’d said climate protection is not a human right, it would’ve been impossible.... that Europe’s biggest court on human rights would’ve stepped back.”

Now the next phase of waiting begins. The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said it will analyze the judgment and “review what measures Switzerland will take in the future.” Viola Amherd, Switzerland’s president, was more blunt: “I would like to know what the grounds for it are,” she said. 

Members of KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz react following the decision. Photographer: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images

While they wait, Baehr, Stern and their colleagues are enjoying a victory lap. Baehr says she has nothing but admiration for the women, and feels an almost familial bond with them. “I had a strong relationship with my German grandmother and I really like them,” she says. “They’re great women who’ve devoted thousands of hours to this cause.”

Stern is just as complimentary, calling Baehr “the brains” of the campaign and describing her fellow plaintiffs as “agents of change.” 

“Statistically speaking, we are not going to be here in 10 years,” Stern says, “so we are doing this for future generations.” With apologies, she then cut the interview short. It was time to pack and catch a train to the Swiss capital Bern — for a celebration party.