belgium

More than 60,000 Belgian citizens, with the support of non-profit organization Klimaatzaak/ L’Affaire Climat (Climate Case Belgium), commenced this lawsuit in April 2015, after being inspired by and consulting with Our Children’s Trust. They claim that the country’s federal and regional authorities failed to take adequate action to address climate change in violation of their constitutional rights to the protection of health and a healthy environment as well as their human rights to life and to familial privacy. After a three-year procedural dispute, centering on whether to conduct the litigation in Dutch or French, the Belgian Court of Cassation (“Cour de Cassation” in French, “Hof de Cassatie” in Dutch) ruled in early 2018 that the case will proceed in French. In 2021, the court held that the plaintiffs had standing to bring their claims and that the judiciary had a duty to review the legality of the government’s climate policy. The court recognized that “[i]n the current state of climate science . . . there can no longer be any doubt that there is a real threat of dangerous climate change with a direct negative effect on the daily lives of current and future generations of Belgium’s inhabitants.” The court described the government’s long-standing failure to reduce GHG emissions and declared that the government infringed the fundamental rights of the plaintiffs “by failing to take all necessary measures to prevent the effects of climate change on the plaintiffs’ life and privacy.”

This case is similar to Juliana v. United States in that the claimants seek judicial protection of their fundamental rights, but is different in that it challenges the government’s failure to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as opposed to the government’s affirmative conduct in causing climate change. A blog post by Our Children’s Trust’s Chief Legal Counsel Julia Olson, leading climate change attorney Roger Cox, and Serge de Gheldere, Belgian engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Klimaatzaak, describes the origin and original purpose of the lawsuit.