Yesterday, a landmark ruling saw plans for a third runway at London’s Heathrow airport deemed illegal. The Court of Appeal ruled that ministers involved in the decision to green light the expansion failed to take into account the government’s commitment to tackle climate change in the Paris Agreement. 

The Agreement, of which the UK is one of 195 signatories, seeks to keep global temperature increases below two degrees above pre-industrial levels. Yesterday’s ruling is the first such decision in the world to consider that agreement and is expected to have widespread ramifications, with campaigners across the globe likely to mount their own legal battles to fight climate change. 

The expansion of Heathrow has long been controversial, with campaigners locked in battles for over a decade attempting to block the building of a third runway which they say will produce more emissions than the entire country of Kenya. In 2015, upon his election as Member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, now-Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to ‘lay down with you in front of the bulldozers’ to thwart expansion of the airport which is already the busiest in Europe. 

In the years since this promise to the people of west London, his words have turned to inaction. The building of the third runway was approved by the government and headed to parliament. Johnson was conspicuously absent on the day of the vote—on a hastily-arranged day-trip out of the country. In the two years since the vote, the Conservative government has vetoed a tidal power plant in the Swansea bay, approved a new open-cast mine in Cumbria, and rolled back on a ban on fracking. 

In last December’s general election campaign, it became clearer that Boris Johnson’s Conservative party does not care about the climate. Despite bold claims about building a greener Britain, it was sorely evident that they were merely paying lip service, designed to mask an ambivalence woven deep into Johnson’s Tory party. 

This ambivalence was perhaps best demonstrated by the slowly melting ice sculpture that stood in place of Johnson when he didn’t turn up for Channel 4’s climate debate. All of this while we hurtle closer and closer to the point of no return in the climate crisis.  It’s against this backdrop that activists and campaigners launched five separate judicial reviews against the expansion decision in the High Court last March. Yesterday was the culmination of those challenges, and with the government set to not appeal, it looks very much like the end of the road for the Heathrow expansion project — at least for now. 

There can be no underestimating the seismic nature of the victory. It is a testament to the tenacity of the climate movement and the tens of thousands of activists involved in resisting airport expansion and the fossil fuel industry. Yesterday’s judgement also once again brings into sharp relief how necessary the function of judicial reviews are in being able to hold government to account.

A judicial review is a legal mechanism by which individuals or organisations may challenge the legality of a decision made by a government or public body. Their use is widespread, and the application can be wide-ranging — from planning decisions made by a council to removal instructions issues by the Home Office and many more instances. 

Last summer, as stalemate in the commons saw Brexit once again under threat, Johnson prorogued parliament, effectively shutting down democratic institutions in the hope of waiting it out until departure day. It was a judicial review that deemed this to be illegal and overturned the prorogation. Two weeks ago, as the government sought to deport up to fifty people on a deportation charter flight to Jamaica, it was a judicial review which blocked around half of that number from being deported owing to their inability to gain access to proper legal advice in the run up. 

For many at the sharpest edges of the ‘hostile environment,’ judicial reviews are their lawyer’s only tool in thwarting deportations by an overzealous home office with an increasingly loose understanding of human rights. Without them, there would simply be no way of preventing illegal removals of vulnerable people, sometimes to their deaths. 

With Boris Johnson commanding a large majority in the House of Commons, its judicial reviews that have the ability to block the worst excesses of his political agenda, and it’s for this reason that he has committed his government to limiting their use. 

In the party’s 2019 manifesto, the Conservatives promised to ‘ensure that [judicial reviews are] not abused to conduct politics by another means, or create unnecessary delays’. In reaction to the halting of deportations on the so called ‘Jamaica 50’ flight, a Number 10 spokesperson stated that the government was planning on taking ‘urgent action against the farce that judicial reviews have become.’

In reaction, Amanda Pinto QC, head of the Bar Council stated ‘Judicial review is a hugely important tool in a democratic society… far from being a mark of dysfunction, judicial review is an appropriate check on decision-making, of which a nation should be proud.’

More than just something to be proud of, judicial reviews are a vital part of our democracy and the fight for justice. Without them neither yesterday’s court of appeal decision, nor the intervention in this month’s callous deportations or the revoking of Johnson’s calamitous proroguing would have happened. There can be no mistake, the fight to keep judicial reviews must be central to our movement, because without them the fight for so much — for climate, for migrant justice, for democracy, is already lost.