The climate-crusading lawyer who sued Switzerland over global warming — and won

Eight years of legal fighting came down to this one moment.

On 9 April, Cordelia Bähr and the 2,500-plus women she represented in a landmark climate lawsuit were waiting to hear how the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would rule.

“I was very, very, very nervous,” says Bähr. But at the same time, she expected her side to prevail.

In 2015, as a young lawyer in Zurich, Bähr began working on a revolutionary concept in climate-change litigation. While poring over research on the 2003 heatwave in Europe that killed 70,000 people, Bähr learnt that older women died at unusually high rates during that disaster, and that they are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This fact, she realized, opened the door to a lawsuit against the Swiss government for violating the rights of older women by failing to take steps to prevent climate change.

Working with colleagues and the environmental campaign group Greenpeace Switzerland, Bähr built a case and assembled an association that initially included a few dozen older women, named the KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, or Swiss Senior Women for Climate Protection. After filing its first lawsuit in 2016, the group worked its way through the Swiss judicial system, eventually losing its appeal to the federal supreme court in May 2020. Later that year, Bähr and the KlimaSeniorinnen took their case to the European court.

On that fateful day in April this year, they won. The court ruled that Switzerland was violating the human rights of the KlimaSeniorinnen’s members by not taking adequate measures to limit global warming.

Bähr deserves credit as the “brain of the whole thing”, says Elisabeth Stern, a board member of the KlimaSeniorinnen. “She is somewhat of a shy person; she is never in the foreground,” says Stern, who adds that Bähr “was the only one in Switzerland who could have done it”.

One of the key legal issues was the court deciding that the KlimaSeniorinnen association qualified to claim victim status under the European Convention on Human Rights, by showing that the members’ rights had been violated. Once it established that, the court found that Switzerland had failed to meet its obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

The KlimaSeniorinnen suit was a strong legal package, says Helen Keller, a professor of law at the University of Zurich and a former judge with the ECHR. Bähr “prepared the case so perfectly”, says Keller, that it was difficult for the court to rule against the KlimaSeniorinnen.

Climate change was not something that Bähr was concerned about while she was growing up. It was only after she obtained her law degree that she started to truly consider the consequences of a warming planet. But, unlike most people, Bähr decided that she had to do something about the issue. “When I see such problems, it’s hard for me to just ignore [them].”

And she realized there was a legal angle. “For me, it was quite a natural thing that these two things belong together, and that the climate crisis is one of the biggest potential infringements of human rights.”

Legal scholars say the ruling is already having an impact and that other courts have cited the case in their decisions on climate-change lawsuits.

The KlimaSeniorinnen case “represents a critical moment for climate-related litigation”, says Delta Merner, lead scientist for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC, which provides scientific support for climate-related lawsuits.

The Swiss government has challenged the court’s decision on a number of grounds, in particular asserting that it has already met the requirement of the judgment thanks to two new climate laws enacted this year. The KlimaSeniorinnen association disputes this argument, saying that Switzerland has yet to fulfil a number of the requirements set by the court, including making a budget for how much carbon it will emit in the future.

Bähr is now working on a response to be submitted to the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe. Then it will be up to the committee to decide what responsibilities Switzerland has under the human-rights convention.

Having started work on the case nearly a decade ago, Bähr intends to see it through to the end — although she doesn’t know when that might come. “I thought when you win, it’s done. But it’s obviously not the case.”