Europe’s top rights court says Norway’s Arctic oil licensing passed legal muster, rejecting youth activists’ claims over future environmental harm.

By Eunseo Hong

Norway scored a win Tuesday at Europe’s top human rights court after a group of young climate activists challenged its Arctic oil plans.

The judges found that while the country’s licensing system wasn’t flawless, it still offered enough safeguards to protect human rights and the environment. The Courthouse News Service has the story.

The case was filed by six young Norwegians, backed by Greenpeace Nordic and Young Friends of the Earth, over the government’s 2016 decision to open new oil and gas exploration areas in the Barents Sea. They argued that by expanding fossil fuel development in the Arctic, Norway was putting their futures at risk and failing its duty to protect people from the worsening impacts of climate change.

For the young activists, most of them born in the 1990s, the lawsuit was an attempt to push Norway’s courts and eventually Europe’s to draw a clear line between climate policy and human rights. They said they had grown up seeing the effects of a warming world: shorter winters, melting glaciers and smoky summer skies. If Norway could keep approving new oil projects without fully weighing their climate impact, they argued, then future generations would bear the cost.

Reviewing Norway’s climate reviews

That question, how far a state’s duty to protect against climate harm should go, was at the heart of the case the European Court of Human Rights examined in Strasbourg. The judges ultimately took a different view, saying Norway’s approval system already had enough checks in place to prevent serious harm. 

Exploration and production happen in separate phases, and no drilling can begin until a full environmental review and public consultation are carried out later on. Any shortcomings in the early stages, the court said, could still be fixed at the final approval phase.

The court acknowledged that the 2016 review wasn’t perfect and skipped over some big questions, like the long-term climate impact and emissions from exported oil. Still, it found that Norway’s overall system met its human rights obligations. 

Norway requires its own environmental checks, public input and legal oversight at each step in the petroleum process — from opening new areas to licensing and finally to production — which the judges said were enough to keep the process on solid ground.

Because of those safeguards, the judges said any early gaps could be corrected later. They also pointed out that the exploration licenses didn’t let companies start pumping oil or guarantee that extraction would ever happen. The risks tied to those permits, they found, were too uncertain and too far in the future to amount to a human rights violation.

No immediate threat

Petra Minnerop, an international law professor at Durham Law School, said the court’s approach largely came down to trust in Norway’s pledge to carry out a full environmental review later on.

The judges emphasized the need for any review to rely on current, reliable data, and to consider the combined impact of all future projects together.

But Greenpeace Nordic says Norway falls short in practice. Legal campaigner Klimentina Radkova said the court’s assumption that full climate reviews take place at the final approval stage “is not done for any new oil and gas projects on the Norwegian continental shelf today,” adding that the group is challenging that gap in a separate case over three North Sea fields.

The court also drew a sharp line between this case and earlier climate rulings that dealt with governments allowing pollution that posed an immediate danger to people’s lives. In Norway’s case, no drilling had been approved, and no real environmental harm had occurred. Human rights protections, the judges explained, only apply when a government’s actions create a clear and immediate threat — and opening exploration areas didn’t cross that line.

The activists argued that Norway should have counted the climate impact of oil burned overseas, saying pollution doesn’t stop at the border. But the court wasn’t convinced. It found that those global effects were too uncertain and too far removed to factor in at the licensing stage. The judges added that international law still doesn’t offer clear rules for how to measure or assign responsibility for such emissions.

Read the full story here.

As far as the “climate” is concerned, the Court of Justice often makes politics instead of administering justice: For example, it upheld the complaint of two Swiss women who saw their “health” endangered by Switzerland’s “insufficient climate protection”.