Tory backlash against European Court of Human Rights climate ruling

Danny Kruger, the co-chairman of the New Conservatives group of MPs, urged the Government to quit the convention, saying: “The Strasbourg court is setting itself up as a legislator in place of elected governments.

“The ECHR has been bent out of shape by activists and politicians who want to seem progressive and internationalist by junking both nations and democracy. We should leave.”

Sarah Dines, a former Home Office minister, said: “It is yet another manifestation of woke legal fantasists further corrupting the ECHR in an effort to force unacceptable legal decisions upon the populations of ECHR signatory states.

“The European Court of Human Rights is now little more than an NGO serving the interests of unelected and unaccountable NGOs.”

The concerns were not restricted to politicians. In a dissenting opinion to the majority judgment, the British judge in Strasbourg said: “I fear that, in this judgment, the majority has gone beyond what it is legitimate and permissible for this court to do and, unfortunately, in doing so, may well have achieved exactly the opposite effect to what was intended.”

The Right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), Switzerland’s biggest political party, said: “The ruling by the European Court of Human Rights is a scandal… the SVP strongly condemns this interference by foreign judges and calls for Switzerland to withdraw from the Council of Europe.”

The group of 2,000 women behind the legal action, all aged in their 70s and over and backed by Greenpeace, said Switzerland’s government violated their human rights by failing to act quickly enough to address climate change.

They argued that their demographic group was particularly vulnerable to climate-induced heatwaves, with one woman  saying she could not leave her house for three weeks during the summer.

Jessica Simor KC, for the claimants, said Switzerland’s efforts to prevent a global temperature increase of more than 1.5C had come nowhere near achieving that goal.

She acknowledged that it was the first case of its kind to reach the human rights court, but said national courts had previously used Strasbourg case law to require action by member states.

The Savanta survey was part of the Telegraph-Savanta poll tracker, which is published every Tuesday evening throughout this election year.