The case is part of a broader movement of strategic litigation that aims to test the courts and their ability to enforce changes on the oil and gas industry. More than 2,900 climate litigation cases have been filed globally to date.
“It’s the first time that a court, at least in Belgium, can recognize the legal responsibility, the accountability of one of those carbon polluters in the climate damages that citizens, and also farmers like Hugues, are suffering and have already suffered in the previous decade,” Joeri Thijs, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Belgium, told POLITICO in front of the courtroom.
Making history
Previous attempts to pin the effects of climate change on a single emitter have mostly failed, like when a Peruvian farmer sued German energy company RWE arguing its emissions contributed to melting glaciers putting his village at risk of flooding.
But Thijs said that “the legal context internationally has changed over the past year” and pointed to the recent “game-changer” legal opinion of the International Court of Justice, which establishes the obligations of countries in the fight against climate change.
“There have been several … opinions that clearly give this accountability to companies and to governments; and so we really hope that the judge will also take this into account in his judgment,” he said.
Because “there are various actors who maintain this status quo of a fossil-based economy … it is important that there are different lawsuits in different parts of the world, for different victims, against different companies,” said Matthias Petel, a member of the environment committee of the Human Rights League, an NGO that is also one of the plaintiffs in the case.