The Constitutional Court admits the first ‘Climate Trial’ in the history of Spain to be processed

This ‘Climate Trial’ started September 15, 2020when Ecologistas en Acción, Greenpeace and Oxfam Intermón presented an interposition brief before the Supreme Court against the Government of Spain for failing to comply with its climate obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.

Shortly after, the Third Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court admitted that appeal for processing, so The organizations registered a contentious-administrative lawsuit in December 2020. Fridays For Future and La Coordinadora de Organizaciones para el Desarrollo joined that procedure in June 2021.

However, in July 2023, the Supreme Court rejected the appeals of these organizations against the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (Pniec) 2021-2030, which is the Government’s roadmap for ecological transition in this decade.

The five organizations went to the Constitutional Court last June, where they presented an appeal for protection against that Supreme Court ruling.

0.76% of admitted resources

Greenpeace sources indicated to Servimedia this Tuesday that The Constitutional Court has accepted the appeal for protection in the first climate litigation against the Spanish State.

This means that the highest judicial body in Spain must rule on whether the Supreme Court ruling violated any fundamental right and “if climate change affects fundamental rights”according to those same sources. Last year, the Constitutional Court only admitted 87 of the 11,415 appeals for protection it received for processing, that is, 0.76% of the total.

This route exhausts the resources of the organizations in the Spanish Justice, although the route could be extended to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), whose Grand Chamber issued a historic ruling last April condemning the Government of Switzerland for climate inaction after recognizing that it violated the human rights of older people by not adopting sufficient measures against climate change.

This process was led by the KlimaSeniorinnen, a group made up of more than 2,000 Swiss women over 65 years of age who initiated litigation against the Swiss Government in 2016 because they considered that their lives and health were threatened by heat waves caused by climate change. climatic.