van den Biesen, Phon --- "Will Civil Society Take Climate Changers to Court? A Perspective from Dutch Law" [2011] ELECD 268; in Faure, Michael; Peeters, Marjan (eds), "Climate Change Liability" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Climate Change Liability

Editor(s): Faure, Michael; Peeters, Marjan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802864

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Will Civil Society Take Climate Changers to Court? A Perspective from Dutch Law

Author(s): van den Biesen, Phon

Number of pages: 10

Extract:

10. Will civil society take climate
changers to court? A perspective
from Dutch law
Phon van den Biesen

The last twenty-five years of civil society's bringing environmental issues
to the Dutch Courts is marked by a respectable amount of cases in which
the limits of litigation were explored by adventurous environmentalists.
The experience thus developed may be useful for the topics discussed in
this book.
Climate change is expected to cause the flooding of over half the Dutch
territory sometime towards the end of the current century if no defence
measures are taken. Now that our leaders have failed to accomplish much
in Copenhagen, it may be high time to not wait for that flooding to happen
and, instead, to start flooding our Courts with litigation right now. In this
Chapter I will try and look into the prospects of climate change litigation
possibly undertaken by environmental civil society organizations. First I
will discuss issues related to access to the Courts, then I will have a look at
some of the obstacles that most certainly will appear during the substan-
tive stages of such litigation.


1. ACCESS TO CIVIL AND ADMINISTRATIVE
COURTS IN THE NETHERLANDS

For environmental civil society organizations it took quite a bit of banging
on the doors of lower courts in order to get access to justice. Today this access
is widely available and seems to be a given, but it was not too long ago that
the general sense among judges, among lawyers for ...