The German Climate Verdict, Human Rights, Paris Target, and EU Climate Law

Abstract

The German Constitutional Court’s climate verdict provided a re-interpretation of core liberal-democratic concepts, and it is highly relevant for liberal constitutional law in general, including EU and international law—where similar issues are currently being discussed in ongoing trials before the European Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice. The present article applies a legal interpretation to analyse the national and transnational implications of the ruling. The results show that the verdict accepts human rights as intertemporal and globally applicable. It applies the precautionary principle to these rights and frees them from the misleading causality debate. However, the court failed to address the most important violations of human rights, it categorised climate policy as a greater threat to freedom than climate change, and the court failed to acknowledge that the Paris 1.5-degree limit implies a radically smaller carbon budget. Furthermore, little attention has so far been paid to the fact that the ruling implies an obligation for greater EU climate protection, especially since most emissions are regulated supranationally. Against this backdrop, the EU emissions trading system demands a reform, which has to go well beyond the existing EU proposals so as to enable societal transformations towards sustainability.