Yes, but people have the right to sue the population itself. Usually the legal system comes with ranks, and if a higher rank rule contradicts a lower rank rule, the higher rank rule prevails. Usually the constitution is at the top, then come international treatises, laws, then contracts. So if a law has been voted by the people and it contradicts the constitution or a treaty that has been signed, people can complain.
Imagine, say in the US, a state decides to pass a law reinstating slavery, and for some reason, there is a majority of supporters (because the would be slaves are a minority), and the law passes. Anyone can can then complain and have the law repealed even if it was accepted by the majority, because it contradicts the constitution. The constitution can be changed too, but the requirements are much more stringent than a simple majority.
The government is bound by laws, constitutional principles, and institutional mechanisms that prevent the majority from infringing on the rights of minorities or violating international obligations. Of course the population can't force the goverment "to do whatever they want" and this is not how any of it works.
>Which may or may not even effect the people who are suing at all.
It's evident that the lawsuit does affect them since they reside in Switzerland and are therefore only able to hold Switzerland accountable. If they were to reside in Germany, France, or any other country, they would have the freedom to pursue legal action against those respective nations. This aspect was also the reason for the dismissal of the Portuguese case; the plaintiffs were suing countries other than Portugal.
>You have a court, which was created in an attempt to give legal options to victims of crimes committed by nation state and which could not be heard elsewhere.
It is common practice for decisions concerning human rights abuses by the Swiss Supreme Court to be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which serves as the ultimate authority in such matters.
>It really must be dismaying to see how little anyone actually cares about the environment on a global challenge, for someone who cares about the environment. Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.
They did what they could and took responsibility for what they could. Which is a lot more than other people do.
>If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
To benchmark against India or China regarding pollution sets the standard at its lowest. If we continue this pattern, finger-pointing will never stop. It's important that we raise our standards and lead by example.
Because it’s not about solving a serious challenge facing humanity — it’s about the social credit of virtue signaling:
- Establishing consensus and working with stakeholders would be hard.
- Whining to an unelected, transnational body to force your “benevolence” on your nation is easy.
If people are concerned about the unrest in Europe (farmer protests; collapse of faith in institutions; rise of populists), or more broadly about delivering results on issues challenging humanity, this is counterproductive.
Well, no. Switzerland is not an anarchic commune, it's a representational democracy, just one that makes heavy use of referendums. But just like elections, referendums don't establish consent, they establish majority support. "The population" isn't a cohesive entity, even less so than "the government". If the government is failing to take action and there is no sufficient majority to "force it", that's not "the population" doing it, that's just the majority of the population not intervening (and that doesn't even get into the difference between "the population" and "all eligible voters").
By definition, the ECHR court is the right place to take this if the government refuses to take action and there is no democratic majority for this. If you think the ECHR only exists for "rogue states" that flay their own population in public or turn ethnic minorities into lampshades, that should be a learning opportunity for you to read up on human rights and the ECHR specifically.
> If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
This is literally a textbook example of whataboutism but the answer is yes, they're all bad and there are certainly worse offenders than Switzerland.
But unlike Switzerland, neither China nor India are signatories to the ECHR so they're irrelevant to this case.
Switzerland is a direct democracy, not just a representative (i.e. indirect) democracy. In the present case the ECHR is obviously misused with very dubious arguments. The fact that the ECHR does not put a stop to such abuse will not exactly improve its acceptance among the Swiss voters.
We just also have votations on a lot of things.
Trotzdem nennt man das "direkte Demokratie". Wir hatten noch so etwas wie "Staatskunde" in der Schule. Die Jungen haben das heute anscheinend nicht mehr. Der Punkt ist, dass das Volk per Initiative etc. bei Bedarf eingreifen kann, also nicht nur dem Parlament aus der Ferne zusehen darf. Siehe auch https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/de/home/politik-ge....
Of course your "Staatskunde" lesson in school may have handwaved that distinction because the former by definition is stateless and the purpose is to distinguish between the Swiss governance model and other representative democracies, not doing a deep dive on all forms of governance.
We had "political science" lessons in school and they were largely about the structure of our own system (e.g. one exam literally involved adjusting the federal budget), maybe with some excursions to contrast it with e.g. the US but I don't think we ever learned about delegative democracy, let alone anarchist, minarchist or Marxist theories. Because it was a public school in Germany, the German model of the "social market economy" was never challenged and implied to be the best possible system because it is written into our constitution.
Saying a representative democracy that makes use of instruments for direct democracy is direct democracy is a bit like saying a social market economy (i.e. a market economy with a state-provided, limited, tax-funded social welfare system) is socialism. One may have political motivations to label it as such (either to make it more or less appealing) but it muddies definitions by conflating "pars pro toto", i.e. a part and the whole.
I understand that Switzerland calls itself a direct democracy. I understand that many other representative democracies refer to the Swiss form of governance that way. I understand that this language may even have ended up in laws and legal interpretations, but that doesn't change that "direct democracy" means something very specific (i.e. literally everyone voting on every issue, often in the form of proxy voting or delegation) in political theory. I'm not saying Switzerland does not offer more voter participation than other representative democracies. It is a lot closer to direct democracy than any of its neighbors or fellow European democracies. But it's not a direct democracy.
Think of direct democracy like functional programming: there are plenty of programming languages that were originally conceived of as procedural or object-oriented or class-based that claim to support "functional programming" and some are actually very good at it but that does not make them functional programming languages in the same way as languages designed as functional programming languages from the start. Switzerland started out as a representative democracy and introduced and strengthened its participatory instruments over time to behave more like a direct democracy (check out the PDF at the end of the page you linked, it even uses the same narrative of Athens and the French revolution used by other representative democracies to explain their origins). That does not make it a direct democracy, it just makes it a representative democracy with exceptionally good participatory instruments.
It makes perfect sense for Switzerland to describe itself as a direct democracy when it wants to contrast itself with all the other representative democracies because those instruments borrowed from direct democracy set it apart. But that's like Ruby bragging about being a functional programming language by comparing itself to Python and Java because Haskell and Lisp are not part of the conversation.
These may all be interesting trains of thought, but they have little to do with the state treaties and processes at hand, which are based on agreed terminology (insofar as human language allows such a thing at all) and which are the reference for the assessment of the case at hand. If you are interested in the subject, you should study the works of established state theorists. Wikipedia is a rather dubious source for a scientific discussion of a topic.
Redefining it as a subset of representative democracy through the introduction of participatory processes makes sense when talking in a context where representative democracies are taken for granted but it is extremely unhelpful when talking in a broader scope where representative democracies are merely one of many categories of systems. There's a reason the PDF references the French Revolution rather than the Paris Commune and describes democracy merely in a (largely ahistorical TBH) European context informed by the Enlightenment era and limits the idea of decentralisation to the federalism of cantons rather than exploring it further: it's not about analysis, it's about creating a national mythology and a historical narrative that has the present system as an inevitable end state that can only be built upon but not fundamentally changed.
And all of this is really a red herring because the original argument was about whether the system Switzerland has makes it unnecessary to appeal to a super-national court in order to force a decision. And given that referendums and public initiatives still require a majority in order to pass the answer is clearly no.
Given that the claim is that the (in)action of the Swiss government accelerates/intensifies the climate catastrophe and that this effectively violates the human rights of a minority group (i.e. seniors are more likely to die from severe weather events like heatwaves) and that referendums have not helped change the (in)action of the government, a referendum is the wrong instrument as the question is not what the majority wants but whether a minority has their fundamental rights violated.
You can argue that the ECHR court was wrong to agree that this is a violation of the rights asserted by the ECHR. You can argue that Switzerland should leave the ECHR and replace it with a different human rights bill - and assuming you have the requisite legal status in Switzerland you can even attempt to force this question with a public initiative. You could also simply argue that they should have sued the Swiss government in a Swiss court of law first (I'm not sure how the Federal Supreme Court works but presumably the process would be a bit more involved) before taking this to an international level. But the ECHR court is ultimately the right addressee when arguing a signatory's violation of the ECHR, "direct" democracy or not.
You can disagree with the ECHR. Not every country is a signatory of the ECHR. Not every country is a signatory of the equivalent UN convention either - notably the US is also not a signatory to the UN convention on the rights of children and there are many people in signatory countries who don't seem to agree with it either. But as long as the Swiss government does not remove itself from the ECHR, it is subject to it. You can't have it both ways - or rather, you can and Switzerland does as it hasn't signed protocols 4 and 12 (pertaining free movement and discrimination respectively) and has only signed but not ratified protocol 1.
This is undemocratic nonsense. The ECHR has well defined concerns. Even the ECHR recognizes the separation of powers, and the court has clear jurisdiction in this system. It is not the court's task to expand the scope of the EHCR. At least that's how it was when I was studying law.
And these people are from the country on earth where the population has the greatest control over their government. Switzerland isn't some rogue state, the population has legal means to force the government to do essentially whatever they want. So the human rights violation is essentially being committed by the population themselves.
If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?
It really must be dismaying to see how little anyone actually cares about the environment on a global challenge, for someone who cares about the environment. Instead we have people arguing literal nonsense in a court.