Friends of the Earth Netherlands versus Royal Dutch Shell All companies must act against climate change

The 26th of May 2021, the Court of First Instance of The Hague rendered a ground-breaking judgment in a climate case against the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell (RDS). The Court ruled that RDS has an independent obligation to do its share against dangerous climate change. The legal basis of the judgment is international human rights law, which applies indirectly to a private entity like RDS through an open norm of Dutch private law. Importantly, the Court stressed that not only Shell, but ‘all companies, no matter size, sector, operational context, property relations or structure’ have an obligation to respect human rights, implying all of them must do their share against climate change.

RDS has already announced to appeal the judgment. It is safe to assume that this judgment will spur a whole new wave of climate change litigation. Even safer it is to assume that many academic texts about this judgment will be produced, inter alia from the perspective of business & human rights, in the context of corporate due diligence obligations, private international law, and in debates on constitutional ordering in our post-national legal system. In this blogpost, I give a short explanation as to how the Court could come to this decision, by highlighting some of its most striking aspects.