Could Germany be charged with ecocide? – as per German TV film

German Chancellor Merkel surveys an offshore wind site [image credit: evwind.es]

What are the limits on courts telling democratic governments what they can or can’t do? Here the film director’s spotlight is on ‘climate policy’, a recent invention pushed by the UN IPCC. It seems governments are expected to change the weather now, or to prevent it changing – take your pick.
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In award-winning director Andres Veiel’s film “Ecocide,” Germany stands trial at the International Court of Justice for its destructive climate policies.

In 2019, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands became the first highest-level domestic court to establish a government’s legal duty to prevent climate change in line with its human rights obligations.

It was a historic ruling, says DW.com.

Along with the Dutch case, initially filed in 2013, there are now hundreds of similar climate justice lawsuits ongoing around the world.

Most recently, young activists from Portugal have filed a complaint at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against 33 industrialized countries, alleging that they have failed to enact the emission cuts needed to protect their futures.

A new German TV film, titled Ökozid (Ecocide), fictionalizes a similar court case set in 2034. In it, a coalition of 31 countries from the global south sue the Federal Republic of Germany.

The International Court of Justice has to determine if the German state violated its obligation to protect the right to life of all human beings by failing to act against climate change.

Germany’s climate protection policy on trial

Using this fictional framework, director Andres Veiel digs into Germany’s environmental policies from 1998 to 2020. The project was initiated in reaction to the worryingly hot summer of 2018.

With his team, Veiel undertook a “very detailed fact-finding research on Germany’s climate protection policy,” he told DW.

The filmmaker is renowned in Germany for his projects involving such in-depth research. With his documentary Black Box BRD (2001), Veiel depicted the contrasts between the lives and deaths of a Deutsche Bank chairman killed by a car bomb in 1989 and the main suspect of the attack, a member of the far-left terrorist group Red Army Faction.

For Beuys, a 2017 documentary on the artist Joseph Beuys, he worked with several hundred hours of archival footage and more than 20,000 photographs.

For this TV project, it quickly became clear that a fictional frame would be more appropriate than trying “to compete with the BBC with another documentary on climate,” Veiel said, adding that his intention was to go further and explore the question: How far can courts go to achieve climate justice?

Continued here.