One Year On: Behind the Scenes of South Korea’s First Climate Court Victory

A year ago today, South Korea’s Constitutional Court delivered a landmark ruling in the country’s first climate litigation case. Sejong Youn, the attorney behind the case, recalls the challenges he encountered along the way, and how the case has shaped public opinion on climate change.

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When a group of young climate activists approached him in August 2019, Sejong Youn had no idea that their offer was about to change his life forever.

The activists, part of a newly formed youth-led climate action movement called Youth 4 Climate Action, wanted to sue the South Korean government for not doing enough on climate change. They argued that its inaction infringed upon many of their constitutional rights, including the right to a healthy environment and the right of intergenerational equality.

“Every single thing they were arguing was completely correct. It was factually and normatively correct. It’s a very legitimate claim,” the Korean attorney said during an interview for the Climate Court Voices podcast. Despite there being no relevant legal precedents anywhere in the world, “it really looked like it wouldn’t make sense to refuse this proposal,” he added.

A few months later, Youn submitted to the Constitutional Court of Korea the country’s first-ever constitutional complaint on climate change on behalf of 19 activists, arguing that the national greenhouse gas emissions reduction target was too weak.

At the time of filing, South Korea’s target was a 30% reduction of emissions by 2030 target from its 2020 business-as-usual level. It was updated a year later to a 40% reduction by 2030 compared to 2018 levels. The country also had a net-zero target in place, to reach by 2050.

“But between 2031 and 2049, the law was completely silent,” said Youn. He argued that the lack of a clear pathway to net zero would unfairly burden future generations with the responsibility to reduce greenhouse gases, a breach of many of their constitutional rights.

Creating Momentum

Youn and his team spent the following three-and-a-half years gathering evidence and preparing court submissions, with the goal to persuade the judges that the climate crisis “is a serious problem.” But the complexity of climate science and the huge amount of scientific evidence made for a complicated and lengthy process.

“We spent a lot of time going through the IPCC’s reports and other scientific reports transforming the scientific language into legal language…because we wanted to make sure everything was conveyed in a compact and easy to understand form,” the lawyer recalled.

“[W]e ended up submitting dozens of submissions on science, recent events, and also developments in other countries… We thought we were doing the court’s job on behalf of them because this is the type of case that the court addresses for the first time.”

While Youn was working on the case, the Youth 4 Climate Action activists used every opportunity to keep attention around the case high.

“They were doing basically everything we could imagine. They were doing media events, demonstrations, school strikes. We also jointly held a movie screening…they had online campaigns on the first anniversary, second anniversary, third anniversary. In September [they organized] climate strikes. They were trying to use every single opportunity to maintain the attention and the profile of the case during the four years,” Youn recalled.

Formed in 2018, the group has been instrumental in shaping the climate movement in South Korea. Until then, public attention, and the work of many environmental organizations, revolved around another environmental issue: air pollution.

“But when youth came up and started talking about climate change, it really kind of changed the dynamics and perspective, and they really played the pivotal role in raising climate crisis as the first and foremost agenda in the climate movement,” said Youn.

One of the activists was Hyunjung Yoon, who was only 15 when she joined the Youth Climate Litigation as a plaintiff. She told Earth.Org last year that her decision was motivated by the need to “connect with more people” sharing her concerns about the climate crisis.

“I looked for something I could do, and when I found out that youths like me were protesting in Korea, I decided to protest in Ulsan, where I live. I picked up boxes from the recycling bin, wrote down what I wanted to say with crayons and paints, and started picketing in front of my school, in front of the city hall, and in front of the park,” she recalled. 

Inspired by climate litigation cases underway around the world, the group began considering suing the government, an idea rejected by many of the lawyers they consulted before Youn.

“[W]hen we were looking into the possibility of filing a constitutional petition in [2019], we were told that it would be impossible, that it would be difficult to be recognized as a plaintiff, and we were worried that the Constitutional Court would even take up the case because there was no such case in Asia, let alone Korea,” Borim Kim, another plaintiff in the case, told Earth.Org last September.

Youn was the first to see in their arguments a concrete chance of winning.

“[The litigation] gained a lot of public interest and attention… because what they were arguing was logically correct and so legitimate,” said Youn. “[T]he public awareness [around] climate change dramatically changed. There’s a much higher level of social consensus on the need for action.”

You might also like: Meet South Korea’s Young Activists Spearheading Climate Action in Asia

‘Huge Victory’

On August 29, 2024, the Constitutional Court of Korea ruled the country’s measures to fight climate change insufficient for protecting the rights of its citizens. It was the first climate court victory against a national climate target outside of Europe.

The judges said that the absence of legally binding targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions between 2031 and 2049 means the government cannot guarantee the protection of future generations, a constitutional right. They gave the government until February 2026 to set firm carbon-reduction targets for 2031 and beyond.

“Future generations will be more exposed to the impact of climate change, but their participation in today’s democratic political process is limited,” the court said, as reported by The New York Times. “So the legislators have the duty and responsibility to make concrete laws for mid- and long-term greenhouse gas reduction plans.”

However, the judges rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that the country’s 2030 emissions reduction goal was insufficient. They found that there is no universally accepted method for allocating global climate efforts to individual countries, making it impossible for the court to determine whether the target is adequate or not.

“[This] came as a big disappointment, because some courts, including the Dutch court and the and the European Court of Human Rights has taken specific target into their purview and they have ruled that they are unlawful,” said Youn. But he refused to call it a defeat.

“These political questions, these more technical questions in [the judges’] view should be left to the political branch or democratically legitimate branch and decided in that way, they will be able to be built upon a wider social consensus. So in a way, they were really respecting the democratic legitimacy and the democratic process,” he said. “[W]hether that decision was a reasonable and a justifiable one depends on what happens from there on.”

An Important Legal Precedent

As of the end of 2024, just over 40% of decided framework cases seeking more ambition or implementation of climate laws have been successful before the courts. The Korean Youth Climate Litigation ruling is one of them. 

At home, the ruling has opened the door for two subsequent cases, filed in February and March. But its impact extended well beyond South Korea, with lawsuits filed in Taiwan and Japan. 

For Youn, legal precedents are reinforcing climate litigation globally. “Increasing number of precedents in other countries are always a plus in the fight against climate change in the court,” he said.

“We are really hoping that the Korean constitutional case can do the same to our colleagues in other countries [and that it] could be a trigger point for broader and wider judicial [victories] around the region and actually beyond.”

But litigation alone will not solve the climate crisis, he argues. Instead, fighting climate change requires a response beyond the courts.

“[Litigation] is just a tool. We need that movement. We need the people to get on the street. We need the politicians to speak more. We need the corporates to act more responsibly, and we need consumers to push the corporates to act responsibly. All of [these] elements need to be there together to make the actual change.”

Featured image: Youth 4 Climate Action.

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