Eight years of legal fighting came down to this one moment.
On 9 April, Cordelia Bähr and the 2,500-plus women she represented in a landmark climate lawsuit were waiting to hear how the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would rule.
“I was very, very, very nervous,” says Bähr. But at the same time, she expected her side to prevail.
In 2015, as a young lawyer in Zurich, Bähr began working on a revolutionary concept in climate-change litigation. While poring over research on the 2003 heatwave in Europe that killed 70,000 people, Bähr learnt that older women died at unusually high rates during that disaster, and that they are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This fact, she realized, opened the door to a lawsuit against the Swiss government for violating the rights of older women by failing to take steps to prevent climate change.
Working with colleagues and the environmental campaign group Greenpeace Switzerland, Bähr built a case and assembled an association that initially included a few dozen older women, named the KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, or Swiss Senior Women for Climate Protection. After filing its first lawsuit in 2016, the group worked its way through the Swiss judicial system, eventually losing its appeal to the federal supreme court in May 2020. Later that year, Bähr and the KlimaSeniorinnen took their case to the European court.
On that fateful day in April this year, they won. The court ruled that Switzerland was violating the human rights of the KlimaSeniorinnen’s members by not taking adequate measures to limit global warming.
Bähr deserves credit as the “brain of the whole thing”, says Elisabeth Stern, a board member of the KlimaSeniorinnen. “She is somewhat of a shy person; she is never in the foreground,” says Stern, who adds that Bähr “was the only one in Switzerland who could have done it”.
One of the key legal issues was the court deciding that the KlimaSeniorinnen association qualified to claim victim status under the European Convention on Human Rights, by showing that the members’ rights had been violated. Once it established that, the court found that Switzerland had failed to meet its obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 2015 Paris climate agreement.