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Tag: UK

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UK Government v. Friends of the Earth

Date: 18 July 2022 

Court: High Court of Justice Queen’s Bench Division Administrative Court 

Citation: [2022] EWHC 1841 (Admin) 

Short summary 

The High Court found that the UK’s net zero strategy is in violation of the Climate Change Act 2008, as it does not meet Government obligations to produce detailed climate policies evidencing how the UK will meet its legally-binding climate budgets.  

Summary by: Olivia Amura

Link to Original Judgement

Click here to open the case in PDF format

Weight of decision 

This case was decided by the High Court of Justice, the senior court of England and Wales. 

Key facts 

In January 2022, ClientEarth (an environmental law charity) filed a case to the High Court challenging the UK Government (“the Government”) on their inadequate net zero strategy. After the case was granted permission to proceed in March 2022, ClientEarth teamed up with Friends of the Earth (a nonprofit organisation that undertakes campaigns and work for environmental objectives) and the Good Law Project (a nonprofit that relies upon the law for public protection) to prepare a full hearing in the High Court. “The Claimants” (ClientEarth, Friends of the Earth, Good Law Project) argued that (a) the Government had failed to demonstrate that its policies will sufficiently reduce emissions to meet its carbon budgets and (b) the current net zero strategy had failed to include sufficient information about the policies and their effects to a standard to allow proper scrutiny. The Claimants’ arguments, subsequently, lead to the assertion that the Government had breached its obligations under the Climate Change Act 2008 (“CCA”).  

Summary of holding 

The Court asserted that the Minister for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, who signed off the net zero strategy, did not have the legally required information on how carbon budgets would be met when he approved the strategy. The Claimants asserted that ‘the Secretary of State [failed] to comply with his duty […] if his numerical projections show that his proposals and policies would reduce GHG emissions by only a proportion (e.g. 95%) of the reductions required to meet the carbon budgets’ [162]. This led the Court to ultimately deduce that ‘without information on the contributions by individual policies to the 95% assessment, the Minister could not rationally decide for himself how much weight to give to those matters’ [213] and, therefore, be fully informed when signing off the net zero strategy. 

The Court also found that Parliament and the public were not adequately informed about the impact of current emissions cuts from net zero policies and the reductions needed to meet the sixth carbon budget. The Claimants submitted that the net zero strategy report, required under CCA s.14(1), ‘failed to set out the numeric contributions of individual policies and proposals toward reducing GHG’ [226], therefore sufficient scrutiny was not possible. The defendant, by contrast, asserted that whilst the required report must ‘set out’ [226] proposals and policies, it does not demand ‘an explanation or quantified information to show that his proposals and policies will enable the carbon budgets to be met’ [227]. The Court rejected the Defendant’s position, stating that it is ‘the responsibility of the Secretary of State […] to lay a report before Parliament under s.14’ [256] that is ‘legally adequate’ [259], as required under CCA obligations. 

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N v. United Kingdom, Application No. 26565/05

Date of judgement: 27 May 2008

Court: European Court of Human Rights

Citation(s): N v. The United Kingdom, Appl. No. 26565/05, Council of Europe: European Court of Human Rights, 27 May 2008

Short summary 

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) formerly established a very high threshold for the protection of asylum seekers with severe health conditions under Art. 3 of the European Convention on Human RIghts in the case of an Ugandan woman suffering from HIV. 

Summary by: Claudia Broadhead

Link to original judgement 

Click here to open the case in PDF format

Weight of decision 

The decision handed down by the ECtHR bears significant weight upon the interpretation of Art. 3 right to prevent of inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). See the Paposhvili decision for further elaboration upon this notion. 

Key facts

The applicant was an Ugandan woman who entered the UK in 1998 under a false identity. Within days, she applied for asylum, claiming that she had been raped by the National Resistance Movement in Uganda because she was associated with the Lord’s Resistance Army. She was diagnosed as being HIV positive and developed Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS defining illness. Medication was only available in Uganda at considerable expense and not easily accessible from her hometown. The applicant claimed that her removal to Uganda would violate her Art. 3 ECHR right (prohibition of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment).

The Secretary of State refused the asylum claim on 28 March 2001 on grounds of credibility, and also because it was not accepted that the Ugandan authorities were interested in the applicant. The applicant’s Art. 3 claim was also rejected, with the Secretary of State noting that treatment of AIDS in Uganda was comparable to any other African country, and all the major anti-viral drugs were available in Uganda at highly subsidized prices. 

Summary of holding

The ECtHR first stated that AIDS drugs available under the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. could also be obtained locally in Uganda, and most were also available at a reduced price through UN-funded projects. The applicant’s return would not, therefore, be to a complete absence of medical treatment, and so would not subject her to acute physical and mental suffering. 

The ECtHR found that the decision to remove someone who is suffering from a serious mental or physical illness to a country where the facilities for the treatment of that illness are inferior to those available in the contracting state may raise an issue under Art. 3, but only in a very exceptional case where the humanitarian grounds against the removal are compelling (para. 42). 

In particular, the court found that for ill-treatment to fall within the scope of Art. 3, it must attain a minimum level of severity that is relative and dependent on all the circumstances of the case, including the duration of treatment, its physical and mental effects and, in some cases, the sex, age, and state of health of the victim.

Further, the ECtHR stated that although advances in medical science – together with social and economic differences between countries – entail that the level of treatment available in the contracting state and the country of origin may vary considerably, Art. 3 does not place an obligation upon the contracting state to alleviate such disparities through the provision of free and unlimited health care to all people without a right to stay within its jurisdiction. 

If humanitarian conditions are solely or predominantly attributable to poverty or to the state’s lack of resources to deal with a naturally occurring phenomenon (in this case HIV illness), the higher threshold of exceptional circumstances is applied and therefore deportation is more likely. 

Potential takeaways for future climate migration litigation

  • Thresholds. In the absence of cases specifically related to climate migration, non-refoulement cases with a medical basis for argument are generally a realistic indicator of thresholds, the interpretation of the articles, and requirements under which protection can be expected from courts. 
  • This case set an absurdly high threshold, and thus should be seen as an unfavourable case for climate migration. For further development (and reduction) of the principles in the case, see the case of Paposhvili v. Belgium. 
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