Making Climate Change Enter the Courtroom: On the Meaning of Emergency and Legal Time for Climate Activists

The climate movement is by definition a struggle against time. In recent years, many climate activists have engaged in acts of civil disobedience to circumvent the 'slowness' or 'inadequacy' of institutional political processes in addressing the climate crisis and its consequences. In the criminal courts where these activists are now being prosecuted for these acts of civil disobedience, they seem to be back to square one: Not only are they faced with lengthy procedures, but also with a very particular perception of 'emergency'. In this paper, I explore the ways in which climate activists in Switzerland have challenged the legal perception of climate emergency by tracing the social life of article 17 of the Swiss Criminal Code (state of necessity) through their criminal proceedings. I argue, first, that ethnographically studying climate activists’ efforts to expand the scope of article 17 to climate change can further our knowledge on the role of time on their legal and political subjectivities. Second, and in line with Veronica Pecile (2023), I contend that the judicialization of climate activism provide an opportunity to question the primacy of historical time in Western legal thought and its (in)adequacy to account for the temporality of climate change in the Anthropocene.