🌍⚖️ Sébastien Duyck

49/ Final note: thank you for following along! 🙏
👀 If you made it this far, I’d love to hear your feedback—what would be most useful to you in live reporting of a climate litigation hearing? Your input will help improve future coverage. Thank you! 💬
〜 The End 〜

48/ Congratulations to all the NGOs & municipalities that have invested their time and energy to seek accountability for Total's major contribution to the climate crisis.
@asso-sherpa.bsky.social @notreaffaireatous.bsky.social @fne.asso.fr @paris.fr

47/ The president closes the session. 🔚
📆 The judgment is reserved for delivery at a hearing set for Thursday 25 June 2026, 14.00.
🗣️ Stay tuned - this judgment could have a significant influence accelerating efforts to compel fossil fuel companies to plan for a just transition...

46/ 😵‍💫 Total's counsel is now literally lecturing the judges on how environmental NGOs are the ones slowing the transition in France.
🤔 This legal defense is beginning to sound quite desperate if you ask my opinion...

45/ "What is sought by the NGOs here, is to punish a flagship company of the European industry"
We are back to Total claiming a major role in the economy.
My head is starting to spin after so many reversals in how the company portrays itself.

44/ The counsel comes back an umpteenth time to the jurisprudence set by the 🇳🇱 🧑‍⚖️ Dutch judge in the Shell decision.
⚡ This intense exchange regarding what sections of this decision is relevant to the present case demonstrates the importance of the 𝑑𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑢𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑠 𝑗𝑢𝑔𝑒𝑠 across jurisdictions.

43/ Total's counsel claims to have demonstrated that the company's scope 3 emissions (the emissions emitted by consumers through the use of Total's petroleum products) do not "result" from the company's conduct.
👂 A loud sigh can be heard in the room... (there are about 120 people in the room)

42/ This powerful rebuttal by the NGOs' lawyers will hopefully demonstrate the bad-faith nature of the company's legal defense claiming the exceptional nature of the case despite the existence of precedents & a solid legal basis.
🎙️Total's legal counsel now takes the stand for the closing statement.

41/ 🧑‍⚖️ The Appeal Court of The Hague sets strong precedents:
𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲👮: The responsibility for climate harms does not lie exclusively with States (¶ 7.26)
𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐏𝐄 3️⃣: Fossil fuel producers have direct influence over their scope 3 emissions & can be held accountable accordingly (¶ 7.99)

40/ Total's legal counsel relied extensively on selective citations from the Shell decision of ⚖️ 🇳🇱 The Hague Appeal Court in the Shell case...
🧑‍🏫 With citations on slides, M. de Cambiaire exposes these tricks, highlighting how the Dutch judgement affirmed many critical legal principles...

39/ 🎙️ M. de Cambiaire concludes the arguments for the NGO coalitions, denouncing the multiplicity of inconsistent documents and reports by Total, and its repeated flip-flopping, as intentional attempts to confuse the reader and to evade accountability...

38/ after a brief recess, we are back in the courtroom for the closing pleadings (30 mins for each parties)...
We begin with a debate on the significance of the term "standard" in French: jazzy music hit? telephonic switchboards? widely accepted norm? (weird argument on Total's side)

37/ 🥺 Total's counsel concludes following the same playbook used by polluters in other climate litigation: "if you were to rule against us, your judgment would have seismic impact on the entire French industry and would open the floodgates for future claims".

36/ 😵‍💫 Total’s choice of defense examples is puzzling: they highlighted the electrification of China’s car market, hardly linked to TotalEnergies, and justified some emissions as necessary by citing sectors outside their operations.
👉 The attempt to deflect responsibility is unmistakable.

35/ 🤯 Total's counsel: "Not every emission is detrimental," then providing countless examples illustrating the importance of steel for the energy transition...

34/ 👉 The legal counsel really struggles to refer to the company as "TotalEnergies", still using the historic name "Total".
This is telling as the name change was denounced by NGOs as greenwashing, pretending that the company had diversified its energy mix beyond what occurred in reality.

Early warnings and emerging accountability: Total’s responses to global warming, 1971–2021 Building upon recent work on other major fossil fuel companies, we report new archival research and primary source interviews describing how Total res…

33/ Interestingly, TotalEnergies’s counsel spent several minutes attacking research showing the gap between the company’s historic knowledge of climate risks and its public statements, research that was not even central to the NGOs’ pleadings.
💡see for yourself:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

32/ 🤥 "We might be a major economic actor in France, but we are not a major company in the global context," says the counsel of the company operating in over 120 countries and with an annual revenue of $140.000.000.000!

31/ Total's counsel again insists on Total's powerlessness with regard to energy markets.
For the umpteenth time, we are lectured again about the electrification of the automobile sector.
(This is fascinating: Total's representatives have spoken more about cars than about fossil fuels today.)

30/ side note: In other corporate accountability cases across Europe (see for instance 🇩🇪 Lliuya v. RWE), courts have explicitly ruled that a company can be held liable for harmful impacts even when acting under valid public licenses.

29/ This demonstration was very illustrative of corporate strategies to evade accountability...
Total's counsel seeks to reject the application of civil responsibility under Article 1252, claiming that a wrongful act is necessary to trigger liability under this provision.

28/ 🙈 The counsel for TotalEnergies now takes the stand, stressing that TotalEnergies is only a holding "made of elevators, computers and administrative buildings in Paris" and thereby not responsible for fossil fuels harms - the actual industrial activities being performed by subsidiaries.

27/ Mabile cites precedents in 🇬🇧 Finch, 🇩🇪 Neubauer, 🇳🇱 Urgenda cases in which courts stressed that the conduct of other actors should not shield a defendant from its responsibility for fossil fuel-induced harms.

26/ 🚫 🔄 Mabile debunks the "principle of substitution" (when TOTAL steps away from a fossil fuel project, other actors always step in, rendering the measure ineffective).
👀 Mabile points to the lack of empirical evidence that would validate the existence of the phenomenon in energy markets.

25/ Mabile responds to the company's insistence on its small and insignificant scale: when the scope 3 emissions of TotalEnergies are included, the company is responsible for 0.9% of global emissions since the mid-XIX century.
This is the largest emitter of GHG in France.

24/ M. Mabile opens the NGOs’ pleadings, emphasizing the importance of this legal provision.
⚖️ It serves as a capstone in the French civil code, consolidating a jurisprudence shaped by historic judicial responses to societal scandals - but has yet to be applied by the judge.

23/ The hearing resumes.
📑 The debates will now focus on the applicability of Article 1252 of the French civil code, dedicated to ecological prejudice.
This article provides a clear obligation of cessation of wrongful acts contribution to ecological prejudices.

22/ 🔍 🏛️ The case is heard by a specialized chamber of the Paris Judicial Tribunal, fully dedicated to social, economic and environmental regulation, competent in all affairs related to companies' duty of vigilance.

21/ 🧑‍⚖️ One of the most striking features of these hearings is the precision of the judges’ questions.
🎯 Here, they showed deep understanding of the stakes, probing TotalEnergies’s representatives on key issues like “effective control” and scope 3 emissions.

20/ ⏸️ brief recess (10 mins)
Let me share two observations about the ongoing hearings:
🗣️ the hearings have been held in an unusually interactive and contradictive fashion - moving through each legal issue with relatively short interventions by each party and questions by the judges...