A Year of Climate Rulings
Handing down no less than five climate rulings in 2025, the European Court of Human Rights (“the ECtHR”) has been busy deciding the backlog of cases it had adjourned in 2023, while it dealt with three other climate cases pending before the Grand Chamber at that time (Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland, Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and 32 Other States and Carême v. France) (see here).
In Greenpeace Nordic and Others v. Norway, decided in October 2025, the ECtHR specified procedural obligations under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in the context of fossil fuel extraction projects. The other four climate applications decided in 2025 – Uricchio v. Italy and 31 other States, De Conto v. Italy and 32 other States, Engels and Others v. Germany, and Fliegenschnee and Others v. Austria – were all deemed inadmissible. This blog post offers an analysis of where these rulings entrenched previous jurisprudence and where they added further nuance and casts a glance ahead to see what 2026 might bring.
Chiseling Out Article 8 Obligations on Fossil Fuels
Both Greenpeace Nordic as well as Fliegenschnee provided the ECtHR with an opportunity to engage with State obligations in relation to fossil fuels. Whereas the ECtHR entered into the merits of the former, it declared the latter inadmissible in December 2025, the last of the 2025 climate rulings.
The applicants in Greenpeace Nordic had argued that both Norway’s 2016 decision to issue ten new petroleum production licenses for the Barents Sea, as well as its failure to assess the impacts of this decision “on life, health, well-being and quality of life” through climate harms, was in breach of Norway’s climate mitigation obligations and the applicants’ Article 2 and 8 rights (§ 212-3). The ECtHR, limiting the scope to assessing the procedural, rather than the substantive obligations (§ 282-3), held that there must be a good-faith, adequate, timely, and comprehensive environmental impact assessment (EIA) based on the best available science before a State authorizes any potentially dangerous activity which could adversely affect Article 8 rights (§ 318), including fossil fuel projects. Confirming previous domestic and supranational case law on this issue, it also held that an EIA for fossil fuel projects must include at a minimum a quantification of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions anticipated from that project, including the emissions generated from burning the extracted fossil fuels (“downstream emissions”) – which makes up the big share of the overall emissions from such a project. The ECtHR also clarified that this covers all downstream emissions, even if they occur abroad from the use of fossil fuels that are exported to other countries (§ 319).
Furthermore, a State must assess whether a proposed fossil fuel project is compatible with its national and international obligations to mitigate climate change and ensure informed public consultation at a stage when all options remain open, and pollution can still be prevented at source (§ 319). A State’s compliance with these procedural requirements will be “especially material” in determining whether it stayed within its margin of appreciation (§ 318), that is, its leeway in implementing Convention obligations in a manner suitable to local circumstances.
In Greenpeace Nordic, the ECtHR was satisfied that the requirements under Norwegian law for the last stage in the petroleum permission procedure, i.e. the approval of a Plan for Development and Operation (PDO), would preserve Article 8 rights, living up to the standards defined in the judgment (§ 335). This PDO stage would have been yet to come, as the case had been filed after the second stage, the issuance of the production licenses (see § 39-43 for the facts).
Focusing on these procedural obligations governing the decision-making process for approving petroleum activities, rather than assessing whether such activities may take place at all in view of a State’s climate-related obligations, the ECtHR evaded the thorny question of a potential obligation to limit fossil fuel production (see a detailed discussion by Ganesan and commentary by Heri and Jamali and Kaupa).
In addition to these developments in jurisprudence, Greenpeace Nordic illustrates the increasing judicial dialogue on climate change matters unfolding between various courts at national and supranational levels. The ECtHR summarized the treatment of relevant issues (e.g., EIA obligations and downstream emissions) in recent advisory opinions issued by international bodies, like the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (§ 131; 136), as well as regional courts like the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the EFTA Court (§ 132-135; 160-173), and domestic courts like the UK Supreme Court’s judgment in R (Finch on behalf of the Weald Action Group & Others) v. Surrey County Council (& Others) of 2024 and the Edinburgh Court of Session’s opinion in the case of Greenpeace UK and Uplift v. Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero and the North Sea Transition Authority of 2025 (§ 177-180). All of these were discussed in the ECtHR’s decision under the heading of “relevant legal frameworks and practice.” The ECtHR also referenced the Finch judgment within its assessment on admissibility (§ 294) and noted that its “view on the existence of such a procedural obligation [to conduct an EIA] is paralleled by recent rulings of other international courts”, briefly recounting the relevant parts of the ITLOS, IACtHR, EFTA and ICJ advisory opinions, within its assessment on the merits (§ 320-24).
The applicants in Fliegenschnee also took issue with the respondent State’s fossil fuel policy, claiming that Austria’s failure to ban the sale of fossil fuels amounted to a violation of their Article 8 rights, among others. They acknowledged that Austria had a wide margin of appreciation as regards measures to fulfil its positive ECHR obligations, but argued that this did not extend to “a complete lack of appropriate protective measures or measures which were inadequate to achieve the goal” (§ 23).
The ECtHR resorted to reiterating the two-tiered scope of the State’s margin of appreciation in the climate context established in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen, according to which the margin of appreciation is reduced as regards the setting of the requisite aims and objectives for combating climate change, but wide on the choice of measures to achieve those objectives (§ 28). Continuing in the same vein as Greenpeace Nordic, the ECtHR did not substantively engage with the issue of continued fossil fuel reliance. It found the decision on whether or not to ban the sale of fossil fuels, as a potential measure for achieving climate objectives, to be covered by a wide margin of appreciation. “Article 8 cannot be read to guarantee a right to a particular mitigation measure by a specific State body under a certain sectoral law of an applicant’s choice”. This was even more pertinent in this case, where the authority in question was not seen to be competent to enact such a ban (§ 33). The complaint was manifestly ill-founded and, therefore, inadmissible (§ 35).
Extraterritorial Jurisdiction
In Uricchio and De Conto, the ECtHR reiterated the view it previously expressed in Duarte Agostinho that States do not exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction by way of their GHG emissions or a failures to limit these emissions (see, for example, Rocha and Raible for a detailed discussion of Duarte Agostinho). Both cases were not only brought against Italy, the State in which the two (youth) applicants resided, but against 31, respectively 32, other member states, alleging they had all failed to take the measures required under the Paris Agreement (§ 5 for both) and thus violated the applicants’ Article 2 and 8 rights, among others. The applicant in Uricchio complained about allergies, skin rashes, and respiratory problems in connection with higher temperatures, as well as a state of anxiety, difficulty to sleep and nightmares in connection with the flooding in the city of Matera (§ 3). The applicant in De Conto complained about severe anxiety in the face of natural disaster like the storm “Vaia”, and the thought of living in an increasingly warming world for the rest of her days (§ 2).
According to the ECtHR, however, the special circumstances of climate change are not of such a nature as to bring applicants residing outside of a State’s territory under that State’s jurisdiction for the purpose of Article 1 ECHR. In both cases, the ECtHR found that all respondent States other than Italy lacked jurisdiction, as none of them were seen to be exercising effective control over an area outside of their territory. Nor were any state agents exercising authority or control over the applicants; nor were there any other “exceptional circumstances” or “special features” that would allow the conclusion that they exercised extraterritorial jurisdiction. One could interpret the ECtHR’s explicit “underlin[ing] (…) that the applicant did not submit any specific arguments on the subject of extraterritorial jurisdiction” (§ 9 for both) in both Uricchio and De Conto as an invitation for further substantiation in another case. Given the strong precedent set in Duarte Agostinho, however, a future mitigation case claiming extraterritorial jurisdiction based on the general transboundary features of climate change would have to put forward a convincing new line of argumentation.
Maintaining a High Threshold for Victim Status
So far, the ECtHR has deemed virtually all individual applicants’ complaints in the climate context inadmissible. The Court has stuck by the high threshold for victim status under Article 8 set by Verein KlimaSeniorinnen, which requires a) a high intensity of exposure to the adverse effects of climate change and b) a pressing need to ensure individual protection. None of the individual applicants in cases heard by the ECtHR were found to meet these requirements.
The ECtHR repeatedly highlighted the lack of medical certificates or other documents substantiating the claims of high exposure to adverse effects of climate change as an issue impeding the acknowledgment of victim status: In De Conto, where three medical certificates were provided, the ECtHR found their content insufficient to establish a correlation between the complaint and the conditions described (§ 14). In Uricchio (§ 14), Greenpeace Nordic (§ 304) and Fliegenschnee (§ 31), the ECtHR explicitly noted the lack of medical certificates. For more on the lack of evidence in these cases, see Auner and Heri.
The applicants in Engels claimed that Germany’s Federal Climate Change Act, as amended after the German Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling in the case of Neubauer and Others v. Federal Republic of Germany, was still insufficient and amounted to a violation of their rights under Articles 2 and 8 ECHR (§ 5). The ECtHR found the application inadmissible, as the complainants had failed to demonstrate “specific vulnerabilities” for present impacts or “exceptional circumstances” regarding a risk of future exposure to climate harms. It held that “[i]t cannot be said that the applicants suffered from any critical medical condition whose possible aggravation linked to the adverse effects of climate change could not be alleviated by the adaptation measures available in Germany or by means of reasonable measures of personal adaptation” (§ 10). The ECtHR also relied on this notion of “reasonable measures of personal adaptation”, next to adaptation measures available to the State government, when denying victim status in Greenpeace Nordic (§ 305). Rundel discussed this approach in detail and criticized it as running the risk of burden-shifting from the state to the individual.
Conclusion and Outlook
From re-iterating its stance on extraterritorial jurisdiction, to insisting on the high threshold for victim status and the two-tiered margin of appreciation in the climate context, the ECtHR broadly stuck to its own guardrails built in the first three climate rulings. Greenpeace Nordic, the only merits judgment of 2025, as well as Fliegenschnee, brought further clarification on obligations in the fossil fuel context flowing from Article 8. These clarifications are limited to procedural obligations. Importantly, petroleum production projects must be accompanied by a thorough EIA including downstream emissions abroad, and an assessment of whether the project is in line with a state’s climate obligations. The decision on whether to take a specific measure like a ban on fossil fuel sales, however, was seen to be within a State’s wide margin of appreciation as regards the measures to implement its own climate objectives, and therefore not covered by Article 8.
Looking ahead, there are currently still four pending cases in the ECtHR’s climate docket: The Norwegian Grandparents’ Climate Campaign and Others v. Norway, Müllner v. Austria, Ecodefense and Others v. Russia, as well as Friends of the Earth and Others v. the United Kingdom. Although both Norwegian Grandparents and Müllner were submitted to the ECtHR in 2021, of the two, only the latter has been communicated to the respondent State so far. Communication of a case under Rule 54 § 2 of the Rules of Court means that the case is now before a Chamber and that it has not been declared inadmissible or struck out at once (Rule 54 § 1). Rather, the Chamber decided to give notice of the application to the respondent State and invited it to submit written observations. Müllner has also received priority status, “owing to the importance and urgency of the issues raised and the alleged deterioration of Mr Müllner’s health through global warming”, indicating which ruling might be expected sooner. The Ecodefense case, filed in 2023, has not yet been communicated by the ECtHR, which led one of the applicants to write a letter to the Court in December 2025 to urge it to “communicate and hear [the case] without further delay.” Friends of the Earth was filed in 2025.
Since their applications are not public, it is not known which vulnerabilities are claimed by the individual applicants in Norwegian Grandparents and Ecodefense for establishing victim status. The individual applicant in Müllner has a temperature-dependent form of multiple sclerosis, meaning higher temperatures lead to a worsening impairment of his muscular movements. Of the two individual applicants in Friends of the Earth, one lost his home to coastal erosion, the other has multiple conditions and disabilities which make him particularly vulnerable to heat while living in a care home whose common areas are subject to high temperatures. The Court’s assessment of whether these applicants are seen to suffer from a high intensity of exposure to the adverse effects of climate change and whether there is a pressing need to ensure their individual protection – in short, whether they are victims in the sense of Article 34 ECHR – will be further illuminating the outline of victim status in the climate context.
Norwegian Grandparents concerns the same domestic proceedings at issue in Greenpeace Nordic. The applicants in Norwegian Grandparents, however, also complained under Article 3 (prohibition of torture) as well as Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the ECHR (protection of property). This latter right is also alleged as violated in Friends of the Earth. These two cases will therefore provide the Court with a further chance to engage with the right to protection of property, whose applicability in the climate change context it left open in Fliegenschnee (§ 37).