Urgenda-uitspraak: Het waarborgen van mensenrechten

On 20 December 2019, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered the Dutch state to reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by the end of 2020. The landmark decision was the culmination of a yearslong legal saga that began in 2013 when Urgenda, an environmental group based in Zaandam, filed a lawsuit maintaining that the Netherlands was obligated to do more to combat climate change under the terms of a non-binding international agreement—the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Ultimately, the Supreme Court agreed, compelling the Dutch state to ramp up its measures to mitigate what it deemed to be a real and immediate danger.

In 2015, when a Dutch lower court ruled in favor of Urgenda, it marked “the very first decision by any court in the world that [ordered] a state to limit [GHG] emissions for reasons other than statutory mandates” (De Graaf and Jans 2015, 517). By that time, Urgenda had already put in place what would prove a winning strategy: linking the Dutch state’s obligations under IPCC with the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically Article 2 (the right to life) and Article 8 (the right to respect for a person’s private and family life). In its decision, the Supreme Court held that the Netherlands was required to take positive action to avert “the possibility that [the] dangerous [effects of] climate change will materialise in the foreseeable future” in order to safeguard the human rights of those residing in its territory (Netherlands v Urgenda, §4.4). Crucially, it ruled that, even though the Netherlands was only partially liable for climate change, it was nonetheless responsible for doing its part to ameliorate the crisis: “Each country is . . . responsible for its own share. That means that a country cannot escape its own share of the responsibility to take measures by arguing that, compared to the rest of the world, its own emissions are relatively limited in scope and that a reduction of its own emissions would have very little impact on a global scale” (Netherlands v Urgenda, summary of §5.61–5.8).

Since the Supreme Court issued its ruling, the decision has been criticized in some quarters for what is perceived to be an implicit bias: by framing climate change as a future event, the ruling seemed to overlook “those whose [human] rights are already being violated as a result of climate impacts,” specifically those living in the Dutch Caribbean (Wewerinke-Singh and McCoach 2021, 281). Another critique of the ruling has to do with its statement that courts can only order a state to comply with a non-binding agreement in “clear-cut cases” (Netherlands v Urgenda, §6.6). It has been argued that, by abnegating their power to intervene in murky or less-clear-cut cases, judicial bodies around the world may find themselves ill-equipped to adjudicate climate change against the backdrop of an international climate-change regime that has moved away from specific emissions targets in the wake of the 2015 Paris Agreement: “The absence of such targets from [the IPCC’s most recent assessment report] reflects the post-[2015 Paris Agreement] architecture of the international climate change regime: in a firm departure from the targets-and-timetables approach embodied by the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement is premised on a more ‘dynamic’ form of differentiation whereby States’ contributions to emission cuts are nationally determined” (Wewerinke-Singh and McCoach 2021, 279).

As Netherlands v Urgenda was making its way through the courts, the Dutch state undertook ambitious measures to rein in its GHG emissions, deciding in 2019 to shutter a coal-fired power plant in Amsterdam four years earlier than initially planned (Reuters 2019). That same year, the Dutch Parliament ratified the Dutch Climate Act, which sets a target of a 55-percent reduction in GHG emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels (Government of the Netherlands, n.d.). Ultimately, the Dutch state succeeded in satisfying its original obligations under IPCC: in 2020, GHG emissions in the Netherlands were 25.5 percent lower than in 1990 (CBS 2022). Ironically, the government was aided in its GHG-cutting effort by the COVID-19 pandemic, which contributed to a 15-percent decrease in road-traffic emissions relative to the previous year (CBS 2022).

Christopher Snow Hopkins