Klimaklagen vor den Gerichten der EU: Der "People's Climate"-Fall und
Luxemburger "judicial self-restraint"

Andreas Th. Müller

To the disappointment of many, in the so-called «People Climate’s» case, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) failed to pronounce itself in more detail on the implications of climate change in the
context of EU law and, in particular, EU fundamental rights. Instead, it interpreted the admissibility requirement of individual concern for direct actions by natural and legal persons enshrined in Article 263(4) TFEU narrowly, pursuant to the so-called «Plaumann formula», and declared inadmissible the «climate action» that the applicants had introduced against various measures of the EU legislator that were perceived by them as being too unambitious. This raises the question of the reasons for the CJEU’s «judicial self-restraint», especially in comparison to the restraint manifested by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court in its recent decision regarding the «KlimaSeniorinnen» (climate seniors). While the latter case is primarily about the horizontal division of powers between courts and legislature, the former concerns the vertical division of labour between the central EU jurisdiction, i.e., the CJEU, and the national courts as decentralised «ordinary courts within the EU legal order».