December 15, 2025
By Dr Corina Heri *** Between the 12th and the 22nd of December, Strasbourg Observers is hosting a blog symposium entitled ‘The Role of the European Court of Human Rights: Progressive, Conservative, or Both?‘The introduction to the symposium can be found here. In addition to this post from Corina Heri, the symposium includes contributions from […]
November 07, 2025
Dr. Corina Heri & Dr. Hazhar Jamali On 28 October 2025, a Chamber formation of the ECtHR issued its most recent climate judgment: Greenpeace Nordic and Others v. Norway. This highly anticipated ruling concerned the Norwegian authorities’ alleged failure to conduct an adequate environmental impact assessment before licensing oil and gas exploration on the Norwegian […]
November 15, 2022
Introduction On October 11th 2022, the third section of the Strasbourg Court delivered an important judgment in the case of Pavlov and Others v Russia (Application no. 31612/09), concerning air pollution, which will hopefully prove to have great ramifications for pending and future environmental and climate cases. In short, the majority spelled out that the […]
October 22, 2021
By Nele Schuldt The case of Klimaseniorinnen v. Switzerland has attracted much attention since it was lodged before the European Court of Human Rights (European Court, Strasbourg Court) in late November 2020. The applicants, an organization of elderly women, alongside four individual elderly women, alleged that the Swiss government had, firstly, on account of inadequate […]
December 01, 2010
This post has been written by Laurens Lavrysen, one of our colleagues at the Human Rights Centre. Traffic noise pollution – especially at night – is one of the biggest health risks of contemporary Europe. This kind of pollution causes inter alia sleep disturbance, cardiovascular diseases, aberrant social behavior and stress. Guidelines from the […]
September 24, 2010
Does exposure to smoking by other people violate human rights? This is a question that merits serious consideration. One context in which it has been raised is smoking in the presence of children (see the campaign of the Flemish Anti-Cancer League on this subject, with a link to my presentation on the subject). This raises […]