Duty of Care

Nic Balthazar

Inspirational behind-the-scenes account of the court cases against Shell and the Dutch government to tackle climate change. With a starring role for understated but passionate lawyer Roger Cox. In two landmark cases, he establishes that catastrophic climate change can be made illegal.  
 
When Roger Cox was a successful young lawyer, a real ‘petrolhead’ as he calls himself, he went to see a movie which changed his life: Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. ‘That’s when I fell off my chair,’ he remembers in Duty of Care. It set him on a path to take the worldwide climate movement to a whole new level. He showed that through judicial action, states and companies can be forced to counter global warming. 
 
We follow him while he spearheads two groundbreaking cases which became an inspiration for climate activists all over the world. In the 2015 Urgenda case, the judge ordered the Dutch government to immediately take effective action to reduce greenhouse emissions. A few years later, Cox takes on an even more daring task in a case against the world’s largest oil company Shell. While Shell pulls out the big guns, Cox and his team prepare for a legal thriller.  

Credits

Director
Nic Balthazar
Producer
Nic Balthazar, Sarah Tak
Year
2022
Country of production
Belgium
Type
Documentary
Duration
56 minutes
Spoken language
Dutch, English
Subtitles
EN
Production company
Wistoria
World Sales
Java Films