Although the Paris Agreement is not a treaty, it will provide NGO's with access to more (transparent) data (beginning in 2023) as to what each government is (or is not) doing; thus increasing individual governments to legal action based on the principle that governments are required to protect their citizens.
http://www.politico.eu/article/paris-climate-urgenda-courts-lawsuits-cop21/The binding part of the deal requires countries to set emission reduction targets, develop the policies for meeting them, publicly report their progress every five years starting in 2023, and update and enhance their targets after each review. But what the agreement doesn’t dictate is the size of those emissions reductions, or the tactics that countries should take to reach them.
This is where individuals, NGOs and other advocacy groups come in. If they feel that a government policy falls short of the agreement’s goals, they could take it to court.
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“Our court case is based on civil law saying there is a very high danger, and therefore the government should protect its citizens,” said Minnesma. “It’s not using the climate change treaty directly, only indirectly.”
The Paris agreement further raises the benchmark against which groups and citizens can measure whether a government is doing enough to protect its citizens, by hiking the global goal to a temperature limit of 1.5 degrees, according to legal experts.
The issue of how climate change policies fit under a government’s duty to protect its people is a new one for courts, said Lucas Bergkamp, a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams focused on environmental law.
“To the extent that courts perceive climate change as an existential threat, and to the extent they believe the body politic fails to address it, courts may be inclined to rule in the favor of climate activists because otherwise the world will go down the drain — that’s how they might look at it,” he said.
Bergkamp said the Urgenda ruling is “highly controversial” and “legally doubtful” because it oversteps laws on the separation of powers. Still, he added, “it is certainly a risk that has become much greater with the Paris agreement.”
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Still, some countries have legal systems that make such lawsuits less likely, experts said. In the U.K., cases filed in national courts have to be based on national laws. The U.S. has a political question doctrine that encourages federal courts to show respect for other branches of government.
Views vary on how effectively the Paris agreement can be enforced.
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And if calling out laggards fails to incite action against climate change, the international reporting requirements could help to fuel lawsuits by providing data to back up claims."