A hearing scheduled for early July as part of the NGO action against the state for " climate inaction " has been postponed, AFP learned on Tuesday from a judicial source, after the government last minute presented its arguments in defense.
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The hearing originally scheduled for July 2 has been postponed to a date not yet fixed, said the Paris administrative court. Following the petition called " The Affair of the Century ", launched in December 2018 and which had collected more than two million signatures, the four NGOs behind this call (Nicolas Hulot Foundation, Greenpeace France, Notre Affaire à Tous and Oxfam France) had filed an appeal before the administrative court, accusing the State of not respecting its own commitments in terms of greenhouse gas reduction or energy efficiency.
The NGOs had deposited nearly 100 pages of arguments, to which the State services replied on the evening of June 23, a few hours before the legal limit. They request in their brief of which AFP has knowledge, the rejection of the request, estimating in particular that the State respects its obligations within the framework of the Paris agreement of 2015 on the fight against global warming, and that individuals cannot directly exercise rights arising from this agreement.
The State also considers that it cannot be held responsible for shortcomings in the fight against global warming under its jurisdiction, stressing for example that industry, agriculture and even individual lifestyles contribute to a large part to France's global greenhouse gas emissions.
For the applicant NGOs, whose lawyers must now file arguments in reply , " the government does not seem inclined to seize the opportunities available to it to rectify the trajectory of its inaction, " they said in a statement. .
