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In 2020, nine girls filed a lawsuit in Ecuador against the Ministry of Energy seeking to turn off 443 polluting gas flares in their community that contribute to climate change and impact their health, and that of nearby communities, violating their constitutional rights and disproportionately impacting women.
While the case was initially rejected in a local circuit court, an appeals court sided with the nine girls, ordering the flares shut down in sequential stages that were to be completed by 2030. With two years having passed beyond the eighteen-month deadline to have initiated the shutdown of the flares, the gas continues burning ignoring the judicial ruling. The girls have raised the stakes and have gone to the Ecuadoran Constitutional Court.
The Center for Human Rights and Environment (CHRE)—a US/Argentine environmental and human rights organization, filed an Amicus Brief to the Ecuadoran Constitutional Court in support of the nine girls, arguing that Ecuador must guarantee access to justice for the girls as gas flaring is a heavy contributor to climate change. Ecuador’s record, says CHRE, is only getting worse since 2020, when the case was first brought to justice.
Ecuador’s gas flaring not only contributes to accelerating global climate change at a time where flaring and green house gas emissions should be reducing to help keep global climate warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial times, argues CHRE, but keeping the flares burning is violating the human rights of the nine girls who filed the complaint as well as of those people living in nearby communities whose health is also affected by the toxic gases emanating from the flares.
The Amicus Brief highlights the recent Inter-American Court Advisory Opinion on Climate Change (OC-32/25), emphasizing that countries like Ecuador must take rapid science-based action to avoid irreversible climate impacts, and that they must also enable specific protections for the most vulnerable and disproportionately affected communities and populations. Each day of delay, says CHRE, represents further impacts and deeper vulnerability to the nine girls and to nearby communities. The brief also points to the special vulnerability faced by the girls as children and as women, meriting more effective measures by the Court to guarantee their rights, violated by the gas flaring.
CHRE calls on the Ecuadoran Constitutional Court to seize the opportunity offered by this case to establish a key global precedent to address human rights violations and climate impacts as relates to gas flaring and that a Constitutional Court order to enforce the flare shutdown, could help spawn legislative change as well as public policies to adequately tackle climate change and related human rights violations.
Link to the Amicus Brief:
Amicus-Brief-IGSD-CEDHA-25-March-2026-Ecuador.pdf
photo credit: Antonella Tello / Accion Ecologica