Young Americans are mobilizing before the climatic inaction of their country. On Tuesday, September 16, they try to seize justice against the Trump administration, which accuse of violating their fundamental rights by promoting oil and gas.
“I worry a lot to think about my future,” Eva Lightiser told AFP, a main plaintiff, whose family had to move for climatic reasons. For this 19 -year -old woman, “it is very difficult to accept for someone who only enters adulthood.”
An expanding legal fight
She will testify on Tuesday and Wednesday along with 21 other young people, including several minors, as part of this action presented to a federal court in Missula, Montana, rural state in the northwest of the United States.
His complaint illustrates the growing displacement of climate combat in the judicial field, often on the initiative of young people of the same age. This summer, it was the students of the Vanuatu archipelago who obtained a resounding victory against the International Court of Justice, the highest Court of the UN.
Citing the repercussions on their health, the group of young Americans attacks Donald Trump decrees to facilitate the production of oil and gas, hinder that of renewable energy and dark monitoring of the effects of climate change.
Climatologists, a pediatrician or former emissary of the democratic climate John can testify to support their approach.
It will be “the first time” that the plaintiffs can directly testify to the new republican government on how their policy “causes the crisis and prejudices to young people,” Andrea Rogers, lawyer for the Trust Association of our children, who represents them, explains to the AFP.
An important constitutional problem
The action is currently in the Procedural Stadium: it aims to obtain from the judge that orders the celebration of a trial. The Federal Government, together with 19 conservative states and the territory of Guam, requires a classification without follow -up.
Although the judge, Dana Christensen, is known for decisions in favor of the environment, observers are not optimistic. Even in the case of a trial, the procedure can end with the Supreme Court, dominated by conservatives. And the absence of a strong federal jurisprudence in a “constitutional right to a clean environment” does not play in favor of the movement, Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law at Columbia, told AFP.
“This supreme patio is quite inclined to withdraw the rights to grant it, unless you have a firearm,” he says.
However, the legal team maintains hope, after the recent victories won in the States.
Local victories, but an uncertain future at the federal level
In 2023, a Judge of Montana agreed with the young plaintiffs who challenged the non -imprecious of the climate in the issuance of oil and gas permit, saying that this violated his constitutional right to a healthy environment. A year later, young Hawaian activists obtained an agreement that forces their state to accelerate the decarbonation of the transport sector.
But at the federal level, the scale does not support the activists side. The best known issue, dating from 2015, was closed in 2023 … by the Supreme Court.
Trump’s government could argue that the climatic problem is a matter of politics and not of the courts.
But, says lawyer Andrea Rogers, “the question of whether the Executive Power violates the constitutional rights of young people is precisely the type of issue that the courts have decided for decades.”
Source: BFM TV
