More than 600 young people, including the environmental activistGreta Thunbergsued the Swedish State this Friday for its measures against climate change, judged insufficient, an unprecedented initiative in the Scandinavian kingdom.
"No climate legal proceedings of this magnitude have ever been brought before the Swedish legal system."told AFP Ida Edling, a member of the Aurora committee, who filed the lawsuit.
The complaint, symbolically presented during a demonstration in Stockholm, had already been sent online on Friday to a court in the capital, the committee explained.
The Aurora committee had been preparing the lawsuit for two years, but it came at a difficult time for the (conservative) Swedish government, which has been criticized for its lack of ambition to tackle climate change.
Sweden, along with 32 other States, had already been denounced before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by six young Portuguese in 2020 who considered the action taken by those countries against global warming insufficient.
"If we win, there will be a ruling that the Swedish state will be obliged to do its part in the global measures necessary to maintain the target" of limiting the increase in the planet’s temperature to 1.5ºC compared to the pre-industrial era, explained Ida Edling.
In recent years, organizations and citizens have gone to court to denounce what they consider to be a "inaction" by governments on climate issues.
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled in December 2019 that the government cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020.
In a report published on Tuesday, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) stressed that the country’s average temperature had threatened by almost two degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, twice as fast as the global average.