Soubeste and Others v. Austria and 11 Other States

Five young European citizens allege that their right to life, right to be free of inhuman or degrading treatment, right to respect for their private and family life and right not to be subjected to discrimination have been adversely affected by extreme meteorological events which are directly linked to climate change and the consequences of which they have personally experienced. They contend, in particular, that the climate change that affects them is driven, to a large extent, by fossil energy industry and that the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), ratified by all twelve Respondent States, protects investors in that sector from regulatory changes and gives them access to exorbitant remedies through investor-State dispute settlement mechanisms, thereby inhibiting the Respondent States from taking immediate measures against climate change and making it impossible for them to attain goals enshrined in Article 2 of the 2015 Paris Agreement. In a letter to the Court dated 9 July 2024, the applicants informed the Registry that they no longer intended to pursue their applications since most of the respondent States either had withdrawn or had declared their intention to withdraw from the Energy Charter Treaty and requested the Court to strike their applications out of its list of cases. In a committee decision of 26 November 2024, the Court decided to join the applications due to the similar subject matter of the applications and strike the case out of its list, since it considered that it was no longer justified to continue the examination of the applications.