Climate Change Litigation Based on Human Rights : challenges and possbilities in Sweden

Abstract: Climate change litigation is expanding at fast speed throughout various jurisdictions around the world. Citizens are taking states’ lack of climate mitigation measures to courts, demanding that more has to be done on the climate crisis. More often now, litigants use human rights based argumentation which relies on international human rights law: human rights treaties, conventions, and precedent from human rights courts. According to litigants, states are therefore seen as both creating and prolonging this threat against the lives of their citizens, violating some of their most basic human rights, such as the right to life. Coupling these human rights obligations with climate treaties such as the Paris Agreement has proven effective when attempting to establish a causal connection between state emissions and climate change’s threat to citizen’s lives. This is sometimes characterized as a global ‘rights turn’ or a ‘greening’ of human rights. While a climate litigation case was denied to be brought up in Swedish courts in 2016, the Swedish government is now in 2021 finding itself tested again. Several children and youths in Sweden are currently suing the Swedish state, claiming that Sweden does not live up to its international human rights obligations. The claim is based on a human rights framing and is more similar to other ongoing or successful climate litigation cases at present time. While also facing a lawsuit as defendants in a case under the European Court of Human Rights, Sweden is now finding itself in the midst of this new phenomenon. Since, however, the issue of climate litigation in Swedish courts is quite new, the results of a new case in Sweden based on different grounds and on the precedent established in other successful cases in other similar jurisdictions, could be different.  The overall purpose of this thesis is to shed light on the intentional human rights obligations that the Swedish state is bound by internationally which can be used in a climate litigation case based on human rights argumentation. The issue at hand is therefore to ascertain what, how and why those obligations concerning the climate and human rights makes it possible or challenging to pursue a case against the Swedish government, and what these obligations entail. If the case is tried in Swedish courts, it will establish the current obligations concerning climate change and its threat to human lives under international human rights law, as well as Sweden’s mitigation duties.