Giving rights to nature, a legal revolution that changes our view of the world

It is a pervasive yet powerful movement, a low-noise revolution that began ten years ago, and now extends to twenty countries. From Ecuador to Uganda, and from India to New Zealand, by constitutional, legislative or juridical means, rivers, mountains, and forests are gradually being recognized as legal persons, when nature as a whole – pachamama (Mother Earth) – is not promoted as a subject of law. Until then, this legal development was limited to the areas where the indigenous people lived, and this legal development was extended for the first time to a European country, on September 21, 2022, with the vote of the Spanish Senate on the rights of Mar Menor, a saltwater lake located on the shores of the Mediterranean Seanear Murcia, Spain. a ‘An important first step’ World Health Organization “It shows that giving legal personality to an ecosystem in Europe is possible”says Maria Teresa Vicente Jimenez, Professor of Law at the University of Murcia.

This international momentum is echoed by several initiatives in France, often carried out by groups of the population, to claim and defend the rights of rivers: The Tafiniano River in CorsicaThe Garonne River in New Aquitaine or the Tete River in the Pyrenees Orientales. These allegations are accompanied by a rich editorial production that explores legal issues (nature rights, Collective, Utopia Editions, 2018)And the philosophical foundationsto be the riverSacha Bourgeois Gironde, PUF, 2020), Political Extensions (The river who wanted to write. Hearings in the Loire ParliamentLes Liens qui Liberating, 2021), or even analyzes its effectiveness, as in the work co-written by the lawyers of the association Notre Affaires à tous (Nature rights. Towards a new paradigm of life protectionLe Pommier, 2022, 468 pages, 24 euros).

However, this change faces strong opposition. The idea of ​​granting rights to natural entities is hotly debated in legal circles, with environmental law professionals concerned with the risks and abuses that might ensue. Some opponents do not hesitate to compare it to experiments on animals in the Middle Ages, in which pigs were sentenced to hanging or excommunicated by weevils for their attack on crops. The more accurate it is“Bad answer to a good question”And the According to the lawyer and professor of environmental law Arnaud Josement.

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