UvA Strategic Climate Litigation Team to Present at ICON-S Benelux Conference in Brussels

From 22 to 23 May 2025, members of the University of Amsterdam’s Strategic Climate Litigation team will participate in the annual conference of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S), hosted this year in Brussels by the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). The conference, titled Public Law in an Era of Contestation and Systemic Change, brings together scholars and practitioners from around the world to reflect on how public law can respond to increasingly complex social, political, and environmental transformations.

ICON-S is a leading global forum for the study of public law, fostering dialogue across legal systems, disciplines, and jurisdictions. Its Benelux chapter, launched in 2022 to strengthen regional academic collaboration, plays a growing role in facilitating scholarly exchange on pressing legal questions in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

At the 2025 annual conference, the UvA Strategic Climate Litigation team will contribute two panels that critically engage with current developments in European climate litigation.

The first panel, Strategic Climate Litigation Against Corporations in Europe, examines how litigation is increasingly used to hold major corporate emitters accountable in the face of regulatory shortcomings. Contributions address the legal status of corporate actors operating within incomplete regulatory frameworks (Christina Eckes), the role of international soft law in shaping corporate climate responsibilities (Simon Waswa), the democratic implications of including plaintiffs from the Global South (Clara Kammeringer), and the enforcement potential of litigation in the EU’s sustainable finance architecture (Chiara Treglia from LUISS Rome).

The second panel, Non-Aligned Climate Cases: What Role in Europe?, turns to litigation that does not aim to accelerate climate action, but instead resists, complicates, or redirects it. Topics include the strategic deployment of climate science in deregulatory litigation (Renske Natté), jurisdictional and institutional constraints on domestic climate adjudication (Christina Eckes), the underuse of EU-level venues for just transition litigation (Rena Hänel), and the emerging role of ‘just transition’ claims in contesting climate measures (Clara Labus from LUISS Rome, currently visiting researcher in Amsterdam).

Through these panels, the team will contribute to broader discussions at ICON-S about how public law adapts to climate-related contestation and the structural shifts it entails.

More information on the ICON-S 2025 conference can be found on the ULB’s website.