Swiss 'Climate Seniors Win Landmark Court Case'
A few notes on reporting, background, and the like
It’s been all over legacy media last week: as a pars pro toto, here’s the NYT’s reporting (archived link). Dated 9 April 2024, here are a few choice excerpts, which you’re invited to skip if you’ve read the piece before (here and in the following, emphases mine):
Europe’s top human rights court said in a landmark ruling on Tuesday that the Swiss government had violated its citizens’ human rights by not doing enough to stop climate change.
But the court rejected climate-related cases brought by the former mayor of a coastal town in France and a group of young people in Portugal as inadmissible…
The rulings focused on three cases, filed by members of the public in France, Portugal and Switzerland who argued that their governments, by not doing enough to mitigate climate change, were violating the citizens’ rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The court ‘has actually said that by not meeting its targets on climate, Switzerland has violated the rights of the European human rights convention’, said Annalisa Savaresi, a professor of environmental law at University of Stirling in Scotland.
National courts would be watching the ruling closely, she said. ‘This is huge.’
The reporting by the NYT is hilariously bad (which isn’t exactly ‘news’), for here’s a partial list of stuff they merely ‘leave out’, i.e., lying by omission:
References to documents released by the European Court of Human Rights; find them here (for the above-mentioned Swiss case), here for the French case, and here for the Portuguese case.
The reasons cited by the European Court of Human Rights are also recounted in quite misleading terms: while we’ll get into (some of) these weeds in more detail below, it suffices to note here that this is esp. appalling in the Portuguese case whose protagonists simply skipped the national judiciary and went straight to the European Court of Human Rights (which is approx. akin to, instead of filing suit at the local level first, barge into the halls of the US Supreme Court).
Finally, and perhaps most appallingly, what remains unmentioned in virtually all legacy media reporting I’ve seen about these ‘cases’ is—the simple fact that the association of elderly women who ‘won’ is actually co-sponsored by Greenpeace and a bunch of unspecified ‘other supporters’. This isn’t a ‘crazy conspiracy theory’, but a face, as can be seen on their website: ‘The climate suit is an undertaking of the Climate Seniors. We are supported by Greenpeace Switzerland and other organisations.’ [orig. Die Klimaklage ist ein Projekt der KlimaSeniorinnen. Wir werden unterstützt von Greenpeace Schweiz und weiteren Organisationen.]
That said, let’s look at these cases in a bit of detail, shall we? If translations appear, they are mine (as are the emphases).
Who are the Climate Seniors?
Well, their website is up and you’re welcome to check it out (English version, which is less detailed). While their content is quite open about the support by Greenpeace (Switzerland). The latter are cheering the court ruling, yet in their press release, they also, and curiously so, fail to mention that they midwifed the entire action:
Legal language is not always easy to understand for laypeople. When the spokesperson of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) announced the judgement on Tuesday 9 April and summarised the court's considerations, the numerous climate seniors who had travelled to Strasbourg to hear the judgement hardly reacted: it took a moment for most of them to understand what had just been announced. All the greater was the jubilation at the subsequent aperitif in the nearby hotel.
Because what had just been announced? ‘We've made history’, says Anne Mahrer. Mahrer is co-president of the Climate Seniors that sued Switzerland. And they today won their case in Strasbourg. The European Court of Human Rights has condemned Switzerland for inadequate climate protection. This is the first time that the ECHR has ruled on a climate case and has come to the conclusion that climate protection is a human right.
Remember that Greenpeace co-founded, and continues to support the Climate Seniors to this day, but for whatever reason it fails to mention this.
Moreover, we note that the people who are running the Climate Seniors are, in part, deeply embedded in ‘Green’ party politics, among them Anne Mahrer and Pia Hollenstein (both former Green MP), and Christiane Brunner (formerly a MP for the Social Democrats). For references other than their Wikipedia profiles, see this archived version of the website from June 2016.
So, Greenpeace ‘and other organisations’ co-fund this endeavour, which was initiated by red-green politicians. I thought you’d better know that.
What Does Such a High Court Case Cost?
These facts are extremely important, as the finances of the Climate Seniors’ Association are quite…opaque.
If you’re 64 or older and reside in Switzerland, you can become a member. If you don’t fulfil these criteria, you may support the endeavour. Neither option, however, as the former link makes clear,
this does not result in any financial or time obligations.
So, this is an association that doesn’t require its members to do…anything at-all. How odd, eh? I mean, for a notionally ‘grassroots’ group that tries to ‘save the planet’, that’s as close to what some might call ‘click-tivism’ as it gets. Join up, it’s excellent for social media and in-person virtue-signalling, and it doesn’t mean you’d have to do anything.
Of course, everyone is free to ‘donate’ to their cause, which brings us to the lingering, if relevant, question pertaining to the financing of the Climate Seniors’ Association. As a registered association (Verein), certain information must be made public once a year.
Here is the most recent annual report by the Climate Seniors’ Association, which dates from 2023. On page 3, we may read:
The 2021 annual financial statements are presented by Rita Schirmer. A large item are the legal fees. The annual financial statement closes with association assets of CHF 20,555.65. Losses amount to CHF 55,661…
The Board of Directors would like to thank all donors most sincerely, as well as Georg Klingler, Regula Barben, and Muriel Klingler.
The 2022 financial statement gives these legal fees as running well over 200K:
Legal fees………CHF 204,665.04…or 92.1% of the total expenditures
And this is but for one year (2022); the Climate Seniors’ Association, as the above-linked annual report holds, counted ‘over 2,000 members’ as of May 2022. None of them are required to commit any money or time (but, of course, one may do so voluntarily). Here’s how they finance this in 2022:
Total Expenditures…………………………………………..CHF 222,290.98
3000 Intake donations from members, supporters……..CHF 77,842.60 or 32%
3200 Intake donations at events…………………………………CHF 325.00 or .1%
3400 Intake Leporello [a bookstore chain]………………….CHF 20
3600 Intake extraordinary donations…………………..CHF 165,000 or 67.8%Total Intake…………………………………………………………………CHF 243,187.60
Income……………………………………………………………………….CHF 20,896.71 or 8.6%
What a wonderful coincidence, isn’t it? Position 3000—donations from members, supporters—if broken down by the self-declared 2,000 members, comes down to less than 40 Swiss Francs per person and year.
There’s no chance in hell that these (voluntary) donations stand a chance to finance a multi-year litigation campaign. As the ‘documents’ section of the Climate Seniors’ website makes clear, the association was founded in 2016 with the clear aim to engage in politically motivated legal activism, or lawfare.
And, let’s not forget to note, once again, this is but a snap-shot in time (fiscal year 2022), although the budget for 2023—available here as per 30 June 2023—projects a sum-total of 250,000 Swiss Francs, with ‘extraordinary donations’ supposedly covering 170,193.70 Swiss Francs, or again approx. 2/3 of the total expenditures.
Not too shabby for a bunch of retirees on a multi-year litigation spree, eh?
Nowhere, we shall add, are those ‘extraordinary donors’ named, and although I do have a suspicion, we’ll have to take a brief detour first.
Who is Georg Klingler?
Why talk about a professional male in the context of the Climate Seniors’ Association’s court case? Well, here’s ‘Fast Company’ to answer this question:
‘The ruling says that Switzerland needs to fill the gap—that it’s not doing enough and needs to do more’, says Georg Klingler’, a climate campaigner from Greenpeace Switzerland who worked with the women on the case. ‘The ruling also says that it has to do this with reliable data based on the science and respecting the carbon budget that’s still available to not overrun 1.5 degrees.’ The government will have to set new emissions targets and determine how to meet them.
Sounds anodyne enough, although the combination of the origins of the Climate Seniors’ Association—it was midwifed into being by Greenpeace Switzerland—should make you pay more attention, esp. in light of the association’s large-scale financing from undeclared donors.
Greenpeace Switzerland’s most recent financial statement for 2022 does list income of 24.48m Swiss Francs vs. expenditures of 24.38m Swiss Francs. Internationally, income worth 89.1m Euros vs. expenditures of 82.6m Euros is given, of which 11.3% are earmarked for ‘international campaigns’.
In Switzerland, some 8.3% of income was generated by large donations (in excess of 10,000 Swiss Francs) and inheritances; yes, there’s a list of foundations etc., which include the following:
Fondation Andomart, Fondation Sauvain Petitpierre, Fondation VRM, Gerda Techow gemeinnützige Stiftung Liechtenstein, International Foundation for Sustainable and Ethical Evolution, Minerva Stiftung, Oak Foundation, Pancivis Stiftung, Liechtenstein Pende Foundation, Stiftung Temperatio, Volkart Stiftung
Some of them are odd, like the International Foundation for Sustainable and Ethical Evolution whose last ‘news item’ dates from Sept. 2021. Others are very well in the UN Agenda 2030 orbit, such as the Minerva Stiftung (foundation). The Oak Foundation, on the other hand, touts its main mantra—’Justice, equity, inclusion, and diversity’—and was created by one Alan M. Parker (Wikipedia entry) whose net worth in 2014 is given as 2.34 billion pounds and a resident of Geneva, Switzerland.
If ‘you are what you eat’ is applied here, Greenpeace Switzerland is, well, very much in the pockets of the globalist billionaire elites. Moreover, there’s one more questionable statement in their ‘financial statement’:
A big thank you also goes to all those foundations that are involved with us but do not wish to be mentioned by name
I wonder why that might be; also, is this the same statement you people put on your tax filings? If so, may I do the same?
But I digress. Let’s talk about Georg Klingler who works for Greenpeace Switzerland instead. According to various German-language news items—including the tabloid 20 Minuten and the establishmentarian left-liberal Tagesanzeiger (paywalled)—he is the ‘mastermind’ behind the Climate Seniors’ Association.
From 20 Minuten (14 April 2024):
The association was set up by the environmental organisation [Greenpeace] to enable an effective public and legal dispute. Georg Klingler (44), a campaign manager at Greenpeace, played a central role in this process. According to the SonntagsZeitung, he worked with a renowned PR consultant to recruit the women involved, organise an extensive PR campaign and prepare the lawsuit in cooperation with a lawyer.
‘They [the Climate Seniors] were no tools in the hands of Greenpeace.’
Klingler rejects the idea that the climate seniors are merely tools of Greenpeace. ‘No’, he emphasises, ‘the campaign was strategically planned, but the women's decision to get involved was entirely voluntary and they found the project interesting.’ The association was able to act independently within the defined limits.
Although Klingler took part in all meetings as the association's secretary, the main responsibility for administrative tasks lay with him in order to relieve the women, who were already doing a lot of voluntary work. ‘As secretary, I had no decision-making powers anyway’, he adds.
Sounds a wee bit…fishy, doesn’t it? This is how 20 Minuten continues its piece:
A Greenpeace representative was always present to organise the appointments and coordinate with the press. The project cost over one million francs, excluding the salaries of Greenpeace employees, financed by the environmental organisation.
Costs running well over 1m Swiss Francs, financed by ‘extraordinary’—i.e., undisclosed—donors, with Greenpeace running the campaign. Lots of seemingly nice elderly women, ‘coordinated’ by a Greenpeace activist (Georg Klingler) who possibly drew a salary from Greenpeace Switzerland to do so.
This situation is further corroborated by the ‘Fast Company’ piece I quoted at the beginning. While they apparently talked to Mr. Klingler, too, they also interviewed one Elisabeth Stern (76), who is introduced in the following way:
It started with [Georg Klingler]. He heard about a case in the Netherlands from an NGO (nongovernmental organization] called Urgenda. They took their government to court for not doing enough in terms of climate action. They won that case, and he heard about it and thought we should do the same thing in Switzerland. You can only take your government to court if you’re personally affected, and out of the population, the most affected are elder women. So he went in search of elder women.
Needless to say, Ms. Stern, is excited:
How does it feel now that you have the final ruling?
Unbelievably, we just won on every single point [this is, of course, utter nonsense; what has happened is that the European Court of Human Rights decided that an association has legal standing in Swiss courts]. We waited eight years. That means we had to have a lot of patience. I still can hardly believe it. I slept only two hours [the night after the decision]. I’m sort of in an adrenaline cloud or something. I’m also getting ready for all the nasty comments we will get because some people, specifically the more politically right, don’t like this judgment. The government is not going to be excited. But that’s just how it is.
Perhaps it’s not just ‘some people [on] the more politically right’ who dislike the ruling for its content; it might well be that the Swiss Supreme Court has denied the motion because an association has no legal standing (they left this open). Now, the European Court of Human Rights has set a precedent in terms of associations having legal standing (which the Swiss Constitution didn’t envision, hence the Supreme Court’s decision). One could also, therefore, disagree with the ruling as it created a precedent of supra-national law superseding constitutionally enshrined provisions. Jus’ sayin’.
Bottom Lines
Courtesy of Ralph Kley, here’s a useful summary (from over at TKP):
During the proceedings, the ECHR received a large number of statements from third parties and also referenced them in its judgment. The comparison with the expert report in classic civil proceedings is obvious…judges may not simply trust the findings of experts (or other parties involved in the process) when assessing evidence, but they must, for example, check them for logical consistency and weigh up conflicting opinions with comprehensible arguments.
The ECHR did not carry out such a balancing exercise. He replaced it with a retelling of the opinions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and certain states and associations, which is impressive in its sheer volume, and then states succinctly:
‘In sum, on the basis of the above findings, the Court will proceed with its assessment of the issues arising in the present case by taking it as a matter of fact that there are sufficiently reliable indications that anthropogenic climate change exists, that it poses a serious current and future threat to the enjoyment of human rights guaranteed under the Convention, that States are aware of it and capable of taking measures to effectively address it, that the relevant risks are projected to be lower if the rise in temperature is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and if action is taken urgently, and that current global mitigation efforts are not sufficient to meet the latter target.’ (Paragraph 436 of the judgment)
In this, the European Court of Human Rights mimics, to a certain extent, the International Military Tribunal held in 1946/47 in Nuremberg that also declared certain statements as a matter of fact.
This has nothing to do with a careful weighing of the evidence before the Court or an even-handed assessment thereof.
This apparent—and obvious failure—didn’t escape notice in Switzerland’s paper of record, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), which ran a piece entitled ‘Absurd Verdict Against Switzerland: Strasbourg Conducts Climate Policy from the Bench’ (by Katharina Forlan, 9 April 2024), whose gist is summed up like this:
Strasbourg judges…unceremoniously create a human right that has never existed before and which, in its vagueness, can open the door to all kinds of claims.
Ms. Fontana followed-up on this on 12 April 2024 with another NZZ piece asking the obvious question arising from activist judges: ‘Today an Activist, Tomorrow a Judge’.
The European Court of Human Rights enjoys enormous prestige. But there are also those who see it as a gateway for influential non-governmental organisations.
Isn’t it interesting that the legal suit was brought into existence by a Greenpeace activist, Georg Klingler, who actively recruited the elderly ladies as ‘props’?
Even more so, as there are apparently serious questions to be discussed with respect to the independence of the judges, too.
If the fox is greenwashed and let into the chicken coop, predictable results ensue.
Legacy media is failing, once more, if entirely predictably so.
If anything, the verdict by the European Court of Human Rights suggests the successful subversion of the formerly (more or less independent) European judiciary by greenwashed interests funded, among others, by globalist billionaires.
I thought you should know that.
In the 1990s, Greenpeace was co-opted by the very corporations they used to blockade and protest against. Same with Amnesty. Same with Red Cross, and all the rest: as long as they mainly targeted 3rd world nations and East Block, what little trouble they made at home could be tolerated.
With capitalism deciding to ally with China to again be able to use slave labour, the organisations had to be brought under control.
So the old guard of idealists was ousted by bourgeois managerial class handlers, and figureheads selected as public faces.
Now, it all runs on automatic.
The link to what I presume is the Greenpeace site doesn't work.