Switzerland faces landmark climate-human rights ruling

You seem to be confused about how the Swiss legal system works, so let me clarify it for you:

The government is bound by laws, constitutional principles, and institutional mechanisms that prevent the majority from infringing on the rights of minorities or violating international obligations. Of course the population can't force the goverment "to do whatever they want" and this is not how any of it works.

>Which may or may not even effect the people who are suing at all.

It's evident that the lawsuit does affect them since they reside in Switzerland and are therefore only able to hold Switzerland accountable. If they were to reside in Germany, France, or any other country, they would have the freedom to pursue legal action against those respective nations. This aspect was also the reason for the dismissal of the Portuguese case; the plaintiffs were suing countries other than Portugal.

>You have a court, which was created in an attempt to give legal options to victims of crimes committed by nation state and which could not be heard elsewhere.

It is common practice for decisions concerning human rights abuses by the Swiss Supreme Court to be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which serves as the ultimate authority in such matters.

>It really must be dismaying to see how little anyone actually cares about the environment on a global challenge, for someone who cares about the environment. Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.

They did what they could and took responsibility for what they could. Which is a lot more than other people do.

>If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?

To benchmark against India or China regarding pollution sets the standard at its lowest. If we continue this pattern, finger-pointing will never stop. It's important that we raise our standards and lead by example.

> Russia is in full scale climate denial

There is a big tragedy in the west - we have no understanding of other countries. Despite having millions of immigrants from those other countries.

Could we maybe interview some of them to find out what’s going on?

For example - we’ve been in Afghanistan for 20 years. Britain has thousands of refugees from Afghanistan.

When the time came to evacuate people from Afghanistan, the British team that was in charge of planning, selecting and prioritising evacuees had zero people from Afghanistan, zero people who’ve been to Afghanistan and zero knowledge of how things work there!

Report spells it out: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmdfen...

In case of Russia on climate change, it’s a laggard-follower of European technology and practices. Vodka is produced and bottled with Italian machinery, artillery for war in ukraine is still produced on German CNC machines, Russian tanks had French thermal scopes, and cool dudes drive a BMW.

When all European countries go renewable, after a few years lag, Russia will do the same. The cool dude will buy an electric BMW when all BMWs are electric, etc.

Given that Russia has massive resources and farmland locked away in permafrost, they have been dealt a good hand if climate change is not addressed. So they have no urgency to act, but they are not a malicious actor on this specific issue.

That's like telling someone it was wrong of them to not do CPR after they've found a rotting corpse without a head. Switzerland has so little impact on the global climate, it's laughable and nothing Switzerland could do would change anything whatsoever.

Is there even a technology available that could show the impact on climate change were Switzerland's CO2 magically zero tomorrow?

> Switzerland isn't some rogue state, the population has legal means to force the government to do essentially whatever they want. So the human rights violation is essentially being committed by the population themselves.

Well, no. Switzerland is not an anarchic commune, it's a representational democracy, just one that makes heavy use of referendums. But just like elections, referendums don't establish consent, they establish majority support. "The population" isn't a cohesive entity, even less so than "the government". If the government is failing to take action and there is no sufficient majority to "force it", that's not "the population" doing it, that's just the majority of the population not intervening (and that doesn't even get into the difference between "the population" and "all eligible voters").

By definition, the ECHR court is the right place to take this if the government refuses to take action and there is no democratic majority for this. If you think the ECHR only exists for "rogue states" that flay their own population in public or turn ethnic minorities into lampshades, that should be a learning opportunity for you to read up on human rights and the ECHR specifically.

> If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?

This is literally a textbook example of whataboutism but the answer is yes, they're all bad and there are certainly worse offenders than Switzerland.

But unlike Switzerland, neither China nor India are signatories to the ECHR so they're irrelevant to this case.

Not sure on how it will evolve, right now the parliament is mostly composed by right parties, and the moderated right party alliances (which won), can hardly do anything without the votes from extreme right parties or the other major party theh socialists (moderated left).

So it depends pretty much how they will do their goverment deals with other parties, as means to get their proposals approved.

From 230 seats, 58 belong to the extreme right, up from 20 in 2022.

There is unfortunely a trend there, and even if we are quite cool on these left/right matters at the population level, it suffices that the new laws aren't that cool any longer.