The climate crisis is impacting people’s most basic rights, threatening lives and livelihoods, and deepening inequalities across Europe. National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) are playing a crucial role in monitoring and calling out its impacts, including in the regional human rights arena. In doing so, they are advocating for an effective and swift response to addressing climate change’s impacts using a human rights-based approach. ENNHRI is bringing NHRIs together to ensure that they are at the forefront of initiatives in this area.

European NHRIs publish reports on climate change and human rights; intervene in domestic and regional climate cases; and monitor, report and raise awareness in this area from a human rights perspective. Furthermore, they are stepping up their support for environmental defenders in Europe to tackle the human rights challenges and threats they face.

In 2021, ENNHRI published its paper on climate change and human rights in the European Context. This provides a global and European-level analysis of the nexus between climate change and human rights. 12 ENNHRI member institutions provide country-specific information to illustrate national climate policies and practices by reference to human rights standards. The paper also assesses how the harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions may engage a state’s responsibility under several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention).

Read ENNHRI’s paper on climate change and human rights in the European context. This has laid the ground for the network’s later work in this area.

So far, ENNHR has submitted third-party interventions to the European Court of Human Rights in four climate cases. In these submissions, ENNHRI underlines that States have the responsibility to combat climate change effectively to protect the right to life and the right to private and family life enshrined in the Convention. Moreover, in two of these cases (Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and Others, Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and others v. Switzerland), ENNHRI – for the first time ever – delivered oral interventions before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights.

NHRIs take to the European stage: interventions in landmark climate cases

ENNHRI – including through its members from ENNHRI’s Working Group on the Climate Crisis and Human Rights – takes part in meetings of the Council of Europe’s Drafting Group on Human Rights and the Environment (CDDH-ENV). In its role as an observer, ENNHRI has contributed to the Recommendation to Member States on human rights and the protection of the environment. It also inputted to CDDH-ENV’s draft report on the need for a further instrument on human rights and the environment.

At CDDH-ENV meetings, ENNHRI has underlined the necessity of a binding Council of Europe instrument the right to a healthy environment. By providing examples of national practices, ENNHRI’s statement of March 2024 highlights that such recognition brings substantive benefits; and national experience shows that its judicial enforcement neither creates unmanageable tasks for the courts, nor unduly restricts the policy discretion of States.