Climate Change: What Duties Do Governments Owe Us?

Climate litigation has emerged as a critical tool for addressing the global climate crisis, prompting courts to adjudicate cases that often intersect with complex legal and political questions. Dr Abel's presentation will shed light on three constitutional issues that emerged from the climate litigation in the Czech Republic in which he took part. The three issues are:  

• Access to justice: How can plaintiffs establish a sufficient connection to climate change harm caused by government inaction to gain legal standing? How can courts recognize this requirement with evolving environmental rights and intergenerational equity concepts? 

• Doctrine of political question: To what extent can courts intervene in climate policy, traditionally reserved for legislative and executive branches, without overstepping into policymaking? Can judicial resolution in such cases be justified considering the urgency of the climate crisis? 

• Separation of powers: How can national courts address the tension between legislative inaction and judicial activism in climate litigation within a multilevel legal order? What obligations to the EU national governments and their citizens concerning the principle of conferral, subsidiarity, and Article 4 (16) of the Paris Agreement, which recognises joint responsibility among agreement parties acting collectively within a regional economic organization like the EU? 

Martin Abel is a researcher at AMO with a Ph.D. in law who has been pioneering decarbonization efforts in the Czech Republic since 2019, founding Klub Agrivoltaiky and leading successful climate litigation against the state. Currently contracted by the Czech Ministry of the Environment to identify renewable acceleration areas, he also ran for the European Parliament in 2024 as a Green Party candidate. 

Please register for the event HERE. We look forward to seeing you there! 

Webinar Series Overview 
The Human Rights Justification: Empirical Webinar Series, part of the Horizon Europe HRJust project, explores how states invoke human rights to justify legislative and political decisions, focusing on climate change, migration, and COVID-19. The webinar series is organised by IIR research team members of the HRJust project, Dr Federica Cristani and Ms Barbora Lukešová. 

The series fosters knowledge sharing on these themes, emphasizing inclusive democracy, gender, intersectionality, and sociological and anthropological perspectives. Recordings will be available in the Intersect Observatory’s digital library.