Extraterritoriality and judicial review of state’s policies on global warming: Some reflections following the 2016 Scandinavian climate lawsuits

Abstract

On the fall of 2016, the slowly but steadily growing list of climate lawsuits around the world welcomed two new legal disputes in Sweden and Norway. Previously, the lack of ambition in the struggle against climate change had given way to a rise in environmental activism around the world, where disappointment regarding governments’ inability to act evolved in some instances into a legal strategy to challenge before the courts what was perceived as a renunciation by the State of its primal obligation to protect its citizens.

The recently filed lawsuits in Sweden and Norway are, undeniably, a part of that trend, but they have some characteristic features, regarding both the scope of the claim and the extraterritorial dimension of the cases, that open up new possibilities for the legal analysis of the obligations of States concerning climate change. In this article, an effort is made to analyse those new perspectives in relation to the previous case law as well as their possible grounding in international law.