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Article

24 Dec 2020

Author:
Henrik Pryser Libell and Derrick Bryson Taylor, The New York Times

Norway: Supreme Court rejects request by environmental groups to invalidate licenses for new oil exploration in the Arctic

"Norway’s Supreme Court Makes Way for More Arctic Drilling", 22 December 2020.

Norway’s Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an effort, based on the country’s constitutional right to a clean environment, to invalidate licenses for new oil exploration in the Arctic, allowing drilling to continue and signaling to environmental groups that it would not interfere in climate politics.

In its decision, the court ruled 11 to 4 in favor of the state, a victory for Norway’s formidable oil industry. The court concluded that a set of oil drilling permits in the Arctic, given in 2016, were not in breach of either the Norwegian Constitution’s right to a clean environment or the European Convention on Human Rights. The judges said that the right to a clean environment did not bar the government from drilling for offshore oil, and that Norway did not legally carry the responsibility for emissions stemming from oil it has exported.

If the environmental groups had won, then the ruling potentially could have upended petroleum policy in Norway, which has benefited from the oil industry while also setting ambitious climate change goals for itself...

The case, which began last month, was the first climate-change litigation to be brought under the environmental provisions of Norway’s Constitution, and was among the highest-profile cases in a series of climate-change lawsuits brought by activists in Europe and elsewhere...

The ruling was cause for the Norwegian oil industry to celebrate, said Hans Petter Graver, a professor of law at the University of Oslo.

The decision, he said, rejected “the possibility of using specific cases as an instrument to attack the Norwegian climate policy.” ...

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