- Women Mayors writers
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Swiss Climate Women (KlimaSeniorinnen) win awards for their courage and tenacity
The European Court of Human Rights condemned Switzerland for failing to take action against climate change
Members of the Swiss Climate Women (KlimaSeniorinnen) celebrate their victory in the European Court of Human Rights
June 2025: After the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) handed a group of women from Switzerland a wide-ranging climate victory, their work has won recognition across Europe and beyond. In April 2024, the Strasbourg-based court ruled that the Swiss government had violated the human rights of its citizens by failing to do enough to combat climate change. It was the first time that the ECHR has condemned a state for failing to take action against climate change, linking the protection of human rights to compliance with environmental obligations.
Prizes won by the women, who call themselves ‘KlimaSeniorinnen’ (Climate Seniors), include inclusion by The Independent’s ‘100 formost environmentalists’ and the ‘Human Rights Prize’ by the Swiss Somazzi Foundation. The BBC, the British public service broadcaster’ named the group’s Co-President Rosmarie Wydler-Wälti as the only Swiss woman among the 100 most inspiring and influential women from around the world for 2024 and the magazine ‘Nature’ included the group’s lawyer Cordelia Bähr as the only Swiss woman among the ‘10 people who have shaped science in 2024’.
The Independent wrote in its laudation:
“Known collectively as KlimaSeniorinnen, this group of Swiss women in their 60s and beyond is proving that age is no barrier when it comes to environmental action. Galvanised by the urgency of climate change, the women collectively won a historic case against their government after successfully arguing its inaction had put them at particular risk of dying during heatwaves because of their age and gender.
The group is made up of more than 2,000 women, and the court decided that the Swiss government had violated their human rights by not doing enough for them. The case has resonated across Europe as the weather becomes more extreme, and will likely encourage other groups to bring forward similar cases.”
The BBC wrote:
“As a co-president of KlimaSeniorinnen - or Senior Women for Climate Protection - Rosmarie Wydler-Wälti led a nine-year battle against the Swiss government to win the first-ever climate case at the European Court of Human Rights. With 2,000 other women, kindergarten teacher and counsellor Wydler-Wälti argued the Swiss government’s response to heatwaves linked to global warming prejudiced their right to health, and that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable. Although the Swiss parliament later rejected the ECHR’s ruling, the case set a new precedent for climate litigation.”
Nature magazine commended Cordelia Bähr:
In 2015, as a young lawyer in Zurich, Bähr began working on a revolutionary concept in climate-change litigation. While poring over research on the 2003 heatwave in Europe that killed 70,000 people, Bähr learnt that older women died at unusually high rates during that disaster, and that they are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This fact, she realised, opened the door to a lawsuit against the Swiss government for violating the rights of older women by failing to take steps to prevent climate change.
Working with colleagues and the environmental campaign group Greenpeace Switzerland, Bähr built a case and assembled an association that initially included a few dozen older women, named the KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, or Swiss Senior Women for Climate Protection. After filing its first lawsuit in 2016, the group worked its way through the Swiss judicial system, eventually losing its appeal to the federal supreme court in May 2020. Later that year, Bähr and the KlimaSeniorinnen took their case to the European court.”
“On that fateful day in April this year, they won. The court ruled that Switzerland was violating the human rights of the KlimaSeniorinnen’s members by not taking adequate measures to limit global warming.
Bähr deserves credit as the “brain of the whole thing”, says Elisabeth Stern, a board member of the KlimaSeniorinnen. “She is somewhat of a shy person; she is never in the foreground,” says Stern, who adds that Bähr “was the only one in Switzerland who could have done it.”
Notes
KlimaSeniorinnen was founded in August 2016 by some 150 senior women. The group now has more than 2,300 members in addition to some 1,000 supporters. Because older women are most affected by the more frequent and more intense heatwaves, membership, on the advice of their lawyers, is restricted to older women. The average age of members is currently 73.
The Paris Climate Accords are an international treaty on climate change. Adopted in 2015, the agreement covers climate change mitigation, adaptation, and finance.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) was set up in 1959. It hears applications alleging that a contracting state has breached one or more of the human rights provisions concerning civil and political rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights.
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