As rights-based climate litigation proliferates, early European cases – both from the European Court of Human Rights, and from the domestic courts of European States – have been the subject of prominent attention and imitation. These cases apply human and fundamental rights to States’ emissions reductions policies. In doing so, they reveal deeper truths about the nature and subjects of European human rights law. These are expressed through a variety of constraints, including prohibitions of public interest cases, the present-oriented nature of litigation, and anti-courts sentiment or backlash. Meanwhile other cases, including prominent examples from outside Europe, have taken more ‘audacious’ approaches to jurisdiction, standing criteria, and the temporal scope of judicial engagement. This lecture will examine the current state of rights-based European climate litigation against its broader global context to identify the limitations of current approaches and experiment with more audacious understandings of admissibility and temporality.