Justice, Human Rights and the Moralization of Climate Protest

In recent years, the trajectory of the European climate movement has become indissociable from law: Not only have activists and NGOs launched strategic lawsuits to force governments and multinationals to hold on to the pledges of the Paris Agreement, but governments also have cracked down on climate activists engaging in acts of civil disobedience through criminal law. In Switzerland, activist prosecuted by the state are resorting to their own ideas of ‘justice’ as well as to articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights (Freedom of expression and Freedom of assembly and association) to defend the legitimacy of their actions and the legality of their protests. In my contribution, I explore what new meanings of legitimate political participation and citizenship are fabricated through the ‘iteration’ (Eckert et al., 2012) of these (in)formal standards, building on participant observation in domestic criminal courts. I show that encounters between claimants and judges reveal competing visions of legitimate citizenship’s practices in face of a warming climate and highlight the normative role of courts in shaping a moral economy of climate protest (Fassin, 2009) that ultimately legitimizes criminalization of peaceful acts of civil disobedience in the current historical moment.