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On 25 June 2026, the Paris Judicial Court became the first court to rule on the merits of Notre Affaire à Tous and others v. TotalEnergies SE – six years after the case was filed and three procedural rulings deep. At its core, the case concerns whether TotalEnergies violated the French Commercial Code by failing to adequately report the climate risks associated with its activities and take action to mitigate those risks in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. The decision does not order TotalEnergies to stop drilling, adopt the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions pathway, or reduce its hydrocarbon production by any particular percentage. Instead, the court settled the statutory foundations of corporate climate due diligence under French law, extended those foundations to Scope 3 emissions, and set in motion a structured second round in which the real substantive contest will be fought. The ruling is less a final answer than an architecture – and understanding that architecture matters well beyond France.

Three Holdings That Change the Landscape

The loi de vigilance of 27 March 2017 (Law No. 2017-399) requires companies above certain size thresholds to draw up, publish, and effectively implement a vigilance plan containing reasonable due diligence measures to prevent serious infringements of human rights, individual health and safety, and the environment arising from their activities and those of their subsidiaries, subcontractors, and suppliers. TotalEnergies had argued, consistently and at every procedural stage, that climate change is a global, multi-factorial phenomenon that does not “result from” its activities within the meaning of the statute, and that in any event Scope 3 emissions – those arising from customers’ combustion of the fuels it produces – are beyond its control and outside the law’s scope.

The court rejected both arguments, and in doing so made three holdings of lasting significance.

First, it held that “environment” in Article L.225-102-1 of the Code de commerce must be interpreted in its broadest sense, encompassing climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. The court anchored this reading in the statute’s legislative history – which explicitly invoked COP21 and the Paris Agreement – and in the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which expressly include climate change among the negative environmental impacts that trigger due diligence obligations. The Omnibus Directive’s ongoing rollback of the CS3D’s climate transition plan requirement does not disturb this conclusion: that instrument operates at the European reporting and due diligence level, while the 2017 statute implements the underlying OECD framework as a matter of French law (§ 146). In doing so, the court has insulated the loi de vigilance from regulatory backsliding at the EU level.

Second, it held that Scope 3 emissions result from TotalEnergies’ activities within the meaning of the statute. The causal reasoning is direct: oil and gas extracted and placed on the market will, inevitably and regardless of where and when, be combusted. The emissions from that combustion are therefore not the autonomous act of a third party but the foreseeable and quantifiable consequence of the upstream production decision. The court drew on converging foreign authority – the UK Supreme Court in R (Finch) v Surrey County Council [2024] UKSC 20, the Hague Court of Appeal in Shell (12 November 2024), and the European Court of Human Rights in Greenpeace Nordic v. Norway (28 October 2025) – each of which had recognized the same strong causal link between extraction and combustion. The finding that Scope 3 belongs inside the vigilance plan is the decision’s most consequential holding.

Third, the court held that it cannot order TotalEnergies to adopt specific mitigation measures – not the IPCC’s P1 pathway, not the IEA’s NZE scenario, not any particular production reduction target. The loi de vigilance creates an obligation of means, not of result. The legislature deliberately left the content of “reasonable measures” to the company, subject to judicial review of whether those measures are adequate given the identified risks. A court that prescribed the trajectory would be substituting its judgment for the company’s on a question of energy strategy and industrial policy – a substitution the statute neither requires nor permits. The restraint is consistent with the framework’s self-regulatory design, and with the separation of powers objection that TotalEnergies itself had raised.

The Transnational Reach

The loi de vigilance’s scope extends to subsidiaries, subcontractors, and suppliers wherever they are located. The Scope 3 holding amplifies this dramatically. TotalEnergies must now map, within its vigilance plan, the combustion emissions arising from products sold by subsidiaries operating across more than 120 countries. Done honestly, that exercise produces a global emissions inventory organized by operational jurisdiction. The legal consequence is that a French statute – applied by a French court, in proceedings brought by French civil society – now governs how one of the world’s largest energy groups accounts for climate impacts generated in Angola, Iraq, the United States, Brazil, and dozens of other states.

This is a Brussels Effect dynamic, but operating through litigation rather than regulation. The CS3D will not apply to in-scope companies until July 2029, and the CSRD, while already operative for the largest EU-based Wave 1 reporters, does not reach non-EU parent companies until 2029 at the earliest. The loi de vigilance, by contrast, is already operative and enforceable through litigation, as this judgment confirms. More structurally, it imposes obligations on the French parent company in respect of its subsidiaries’ global activities, without requiring those subsidiaries to be independently in scope of any regulatory regime. For companies with supply chains or subsidiaries connected to French multinationals, the practical pressure to align with the plan’s requirements, however those requirements are ultimately defined, will be felt across jurisdictions. The decision did not address the sovereignty implications of this reach, and probably could not within its proper remit. That question is now one for scholars, trade lawyers, and regulators to work through.

Provisional Enforcement and What Comes Next

The court ordered provisional enforcement of its judgment, on the basis that the prevention of climate-related risks is a matter of undisputed urgency (§ 257). TotalEnergies has six months from service of the decision to supplement its vigilance plan. The supplemented plan must include Scope 3 emissions in the risk mapping and in the associated measures. The case is then referred back to the pre-trial judge on 21 January 2027, at which point the court will examine whether the plan complies.

Provisional enforcement means the obligation runs even if TotalEnergies appeals – which seems near-certain. The appellate court could grant a stay, but the climate urgency framing makes that legally and politically awkward. More important is what the six-month window actually demands.

On the legal side, TotalEnergies must make methodological choices the court deliberately left open: which GHG Protocol categories to use, how to handle double-counting across jurisdictions, how to treat asset disposals in light of carbon lock-in risk, and which IPCC scenarios anchor the severity assessment. The court did not prescribe any of this. The quality of those choices will determine the entire second round.

On the science side, a credible Scope 3 mapping requires TotalEnergies to quantify emissions that, in 2024, it reported at 342 MtCO₂ – roughly ten times its Scope 1 and 2 combined footprint (§ 167). Once those emissions are inside the plan, the company must also publish “appropriate measures to mitigate risks or prevent serious harm” in respect of them. The measures need not follow any externally mandated trajectory, but they cannot be cosmetic. What constitutes reasonable mitigation of a 342 MtCO₂ Scope 3 risk, in a company whose business model is built on growing hydrocarbon production, is the question the January 2027 hearing will have to answer.

That is the architecture. The court has built the room and fixed the dimensions. The substantive contest – whether TotalEnergies’ chosen measures are adequate, and what happens if they are not – has been deferred, not avoided. The Article 1252 Code civil claim, which could in principle support broader injunctive relief, has been stayed pending the outcome of that second round. The financial pressure is modest for now: €20,000 in Article 700 costs per claimant, no penalty payment.

Why This Matters Beyond France

The decision is significant not because it orders TotalEnergies to do something dramatic, but because it demonstrates that a domestic due diligence statute, interpreted through the lens of international scientific and normative consensus, can reach the full climate footprint of a global energy major. The statutory foundations – environment includes climate, Scope 3 results from company activities – are now established in French law. Other jurisdictions with comparable duty-of-care or due diligence frameworks, from Germany’s Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz to any future transposition of the CS3D, will be watching how the second round unfolds.

If the architecture works – if the January 2027 hearing produces a meaningful assessment of whether TotalEnergies’ measures are adequate –, the model becomes replicable. If it does not, the decision will stand as an important but ultimately inconclusive milestone. The six months between now and the filing of the supplemented plan are, in that sense, the most consequential period of the entire litigation.

The paragraph beginning “This is a Brussels Effect dynamic…” was slightly expanded after initial publication to include the scope of CS3D and CSRD.

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Relations between Czech President Petr Pavel and Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s government have deteriorated almost since the government took office in December 2025. A few months ago, the political conflict culminated in an unprecedented dispute over the President’s participation in the upcoming NATO summit in Ankara and prompted an unusually swift intervention by the Czech Constitutional Court. After the government had tried to prevent the President from attending the NATO summit, he filed a competence complaint and a request for an interim measure on 22 June 2026. Just two days later, on 24 June 2026, the Court released its decision granting an interim measure and ordering the government to facilitate President Petr Pavel’s participation in the NATO summit. The decision also includes one dissenting opinion by two judges and is remarkable for its extraordinary speed. Such urgency is unusual but understandable given that the summit is held from 7 to 8 July 2026.

The Constitutional Court’s unusually swift intervention cannot be fully understood from the reasoning of the interim measure itself. The decision becomes considerably more intelligible once it is read against the political chronology omitted from the decision, particularly the government’s decision to postpone the dispute until judicial protection was almost impossible. Remarkably, the majority never explains why the statutory conditions for granting an interim measure were satisfied. Instead, it rests on only two considerations: Firstly, the urgency created by the approaching NATO summit and secondly, the long-standing constitutional practice of presidential participation. By contrast, the dissenting opinion engages in a much more detailed analysis of the legal requirements for granting interim measure. To understand the dispute, one must first start with the broader political context.

From Disagreement to Competence Complaint

Tensions between President Petr Pavel and the current government (led by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, leader of the ANO 2011 party) have existed since Andrej Babiš took office in 2025. One of the earliest flashpoints concerned the President’s refusal to appoint Filip Turek, a nominee of the Motorists party, as Minister of the Environment. The decision angered Motorists leader Petr Macinka, who subsequently became Foreign Minister and emerged as one of the President’s most vocal critics within the Government. The dispute over the failure to appoint a minister escalated to such an extent that the president published on his official website screenshots of text messages that the Foreign Minister sent to the President’s advisor, in which he allegedly blackmailed the President.

Fast forward to today, the latest conflict between the President and the Government concerned President Pavel’s participation in the NATO summit in Ankara. Traditionally, Czech presidents have participated in NATO summits as members of the official Czech delegation. However, on 18 March 2026, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš stated that he would attend the summit without the president: “I think it would be best if I went there with Petr Macinka, because we’ll explain it better than the president.” The remark referred to President Pavel’s public criticism of the government’s defence spending and reflected the Prime Minister’s view that his government, rather than the President, should explain Czech defence policy to NATO allies. President Pavel repeatedly invoked his constitutional authority to represent the state abroad in accordance with Article 63(1)a of the Czech Constitution. In an attempt to personally defend his position and seek a compromise, the President attended a government meeting on 8 June 2026. The government nevertheless postponed its decision until 22 June – only four days before the deadline for notifying NATO of the composition of the Czech delegation – and ultimately adopted a resolution excluding the President from the summit. From the President’s perspective, the delay left him with virtually no time to seek judicial protection before the notification deadline. Yet the following day he filed a competence complaint and requested interim measures from the Constitutional Court.

The President’s Constitutional Claim

The President’s competence complaint raises a broader question than the Ankara summit alone. At its core lies the meaning of the constitutional power to “represent the state externally” under Article 63(1)a of the Czech Constitution. Czech constitutional law has long struggled with the ambiguous division of foreign affairs powers between the President and the government. The Constitution simultaneously grants representative functions to the President while making the government responsible for the country’s overall policy direction. The President’s argument appears relatively straightforward. If the Constitution entrusts him with representing the state externally, participation in a NATO summit constitutes a paradigmatic exercise of that competence. Governmental attempts to prevent such participation, therefore, amount to an unconstitutional appropriation of presidential authority. Importantly, the President did not merely seek permission to attend one particular summit. He also requested a general clarification of constitutional competences regarding future NATO summits. The dispute is therefore not limited to Ankara. It concerns the future constitutional balance between the President and the government in the conduct of foreign relations.

At the same time, the President requested an interim measure. Without it, there was a significant risk that the summit would take place before the Court had an opportunity to resolve the underlying constitutional question. Once the NATO summit concluded, any victory in securing participation would become practically meaningless. This argument persuaded the majority, which, in its decision, presented two arguments: Firstly, the deadline for notifying the organizers of the NATO summit of the composition of the Czech Republic’s official delegation was on Friday, 26 June. Secondly, the president’s participation in NATO summits as an established and long-standing practice. However, this opinion didn’t convince all the judges.

Competing Understandings of Interim Protection

The dissent adopted a much more legally demanding standard. Judges Jan Wintr and Dita Řepková questioned whether the conditions for the interim measure had truly been satisfied. They acknowledged that interim measures are not categorically excluded in competence disputes. Through the subsidiary and reasonable application of the Code of Civil Procedure, two conditions are set: (1) the need to temporarily adjust the parties’ circumstances, or (2) concern that the enforcement of a court decision may be jeopardised. But the statutory conditions for granting an interim measure were not met because the President’s absence from a single NATO summit would neither require an urgent temporary adjustment of the parties’ legal relations nor jeopardise the effectiveness of the Court’s future judgment, whose principal purpose is to clarify the constitutional allocation of powers for the future. The dissent also challenged the majority’s reliance on established practice. The fact that presidents have historically attended NATO summits does not necessarily demonstrate that the Constitution requires such attendance or that a temporary deviation from past practice justifies emergency judicial intervention. Previous practice simply does not indicate that the President alone could have decided on participation despite the government’s disagreement.

The Politics Behind the Decision

The legal disagreement between the majority and the dissent is important. The President justified the need for an interim measure mainly by arguing that a judgment on the merits might come too late to allow him to attend the Ankara summit. The majority’s reasoning is strikingly concise and rests on the two considerations. As the dissent convincingly argues, the statutory conditions for granting an interim measure do not appear to have been fully satisfied. Nevertheless, the most intriguing aspect of the case may lie elsewhere. From the perspective of positive law, the decision therefore raises questions. The majority did not explain in any detail how the statutory requirements for granting an interim measure, applied subsidiarily through the Code of Civil Procedure, were satisfied.  At the same time, one cannot ignore the government’s conduct. After months of negotiations, it postponed its final decision until only four days before the deadline for notifying NATO of the Czech delegation. Whether deliberate or not, this timing effectively left the President with almost no opportunity to obtain judicial protection before the practical consequences became irreversible. The political context may therefore help explain why the Court acted with such exceptional speed. After all, the interim measure may have been motivated not only by legal urgency but also by concern that the political conflict itself was approaching a point of no return. In a sense, the Court forced the President and the government to continue cooperating, at least temporarily, rather than allowing their relationship to break down irreversibly before the constitutional question had been resolved.

What Comes Next?

The prime minister has already confirmed that the government will accredit the President for the NATO summit. The Court may have settled the question of accreditation, but not the underlying institutional conflict. The President now stated that as head of state, he leads the Czech delegation, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs now opposes the President’s participation in the informal leaders’ dinner at the summit.

The central constitutional question of the competence complaint remains unresolved. When (and if) the Court reaches a merit judgment, it will have to confront a difficult issue at the heart of the Czech constitutional system: What is the true meaning of the presidential power to represent the state externally? Does it entail an autonomous right to participate in major international meetings? Or does such participation ultimately depend on governmental consent? The Court’s eventual judgment will likely extend far beyond NATO summits. It may influence future disputes concerning European Council meetings, international summits and conferences, state visits, and other forms of external representation. Whether this pragmatic approach will carry over into the Court’s merits judgment remains to be seen. What is already clear, however, is that the Court has chosen to preserve the existing constitutional practice before deciding whether that practice is constitutionally required.

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On June 17, 2026, the European Parliament approved the new so-called Return Regulation with the votes of the conservative and far-right political groups. All that remains is formal adoption by the Council. Under the Regulation, people can be sent against their will to a country they neither know nor have ever set foot in. By any ordinary understanding of the term, this is not a return. It is something much closer to an abduction.

The Regulation introduces a number of restrictive changes in comparison to the previous Return Directive. Bernd Parusel discussed and criticized the draft on this blog in February. The hooligan-style chants of “send them back” that erupted after the vote offered a revealing glimpse of how how deeply migration policy has come to be shaped by resentment and fantasies of violence. Here, I focus on one particular aspect of the Regulation: the euphemistically named “removal of the connection criterion.”

Emptying the Meaning of “Return”

Article 4(3) of the Return Regulation defines what counts as a “country of return”. Under the provision, this may be not only the country of nationality or former habitual residence of a third-country national, but also a country through which they merely passed in transit. More strikingly still, Article 4(3) lit. g provides that a country of return may be any state with which an agreement or arrangement exists under which the person will be admitted. In such cases, the “returnee” need not have any connection to the country in question, nor need they have consented to being transferred there.

No one would understand a “return” to mean the forced transfer to a completely new and unfamiliar country. The very meaning of the word presupposes a movement back to a place where one has been before. Pointing out this contradiction is not a matter of semantics. First, applying the term “return” conceals the profound disregard for human dignity that underlies this rule. This is a Regulation focused on removing people, and the public should not fall for the misnomer. Second, only by calling the measure what it is can we understand how fundamentally it conflicts with basic ideas of liberty.

The new rule of Art. 4(3) lit. g significantly differs from the previous Article 3 of the 2008 Return Directive. There, “return” refers to voluntary departure or forced return either to the country of origin, to a transit country, or to another third country –  provided in the latter case that departure to the third country takes place voluntarily. In a 2020 ruling, the European Court of Justice held that transit alone does not establish the kind of connection required under Article 38(2) of the Asylum Procedures Directive.

The new Regulation not only abandons that more demanding connection requirement but goes significantly further. Article 4(3) lit. g broadens the definition of a “country of return” indefinitely; the only condition is found in Article 17, which governs agreements with third countries concerning the admission of persons. It states that such agreements may only be concluded with countries that respect international human right standards, including the principle of non-refoulement.

“Re”location to an Unknown Place

Indeed, legal debates about transferring people to countries entirely unknown to them have focused primarily on the human rights situation in those countries. This was the central issue in the interim relief granted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) concerning the United Kingdom’s plans to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda. In a similar case before the U.S. Supreme Court, even Justice Sotomayor’s dissent concentrated on procedural safeguards and the risk of rights violations in the third country.

But before discussing the willingness of third countries to enter into such agreements, or the adequacy of their human rights protections, there is a more fundamental question: Is it acceptable to send people against their will to places with which they have no connection whatsoever? The fact that there is no explicit legal prohibition is a remarkably thin justification. What is at stake here is a core dimension of individual freedom.

One of the earliest milestones in the history of fundamental rights was the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. The principle of habeas corpus – the right to control one’s own body – emerged as a safeguard against arbitrary detention and today remains closely associated with the right to prompt judicial review of imprisonment. The right to control one’s own body is an expression of a basic human freedom: individuals possess authority over their own bodies. Forcibly transporting a person to a place entirely unfamiliar to them, from which they cannot simply leave again, is a serious interference with that freedom. It is not comparable to the deportation to a country of origin or transit. There may be compelling reasons why such removals are objectionable, whether because of the treatment awaiting the individual in the receiving state or because of the ties they have established in the state seeking to remove them. Yet in those situations, the state’s action at least reverses a movement previously undertaken by the individual. There are good reasons to dispute – as the European Court of Justice did in 2020 – that transit alone is sufficient to establish the necessary connection. However, removal to a country where a person has never been, with which they have no biographical, social, or other meaningful link, belongs to a fundamentally different category.

Habeas Corpus

It is a basic freedom to have control over one’s own body, including over the body’s movement. This does not imply a universal right to freedom of movement in the sense that it would permit entry anywhere. It does, however, imply the freedom to move within the options available and not to have one’s whereabouts determined by others. This is reflected in guarantees of freedom of movement within states, in the right to leave any country, and in the strict requirements concerning detention. The fact that no explicit legal guarantee currently prohibits the transfer of individuals to unfamiliar third country does not make such deportation acceptable. The codification of human rights responds to experiences of injustice; therefore, legal rights are subject to gradual development.

The prospect that people who come to Europe seeking protection, and whose asylum applications are rejected, may in future be transferred to any third country is grotesque. The EU is creating a legal framework for what can only be described as state-organized abductions. The stated goal of this policy is to instill fear among migrants and thereby discourage others from seeking protection in Europe in the first place. The power to abduct some people in order to frighten others was adopted to jeers and chants in the European Parliament. Are these the European values?

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