Social movements have always played a crucial role in determining the trajectory of world history. Today, all over the world, various actors of civil society demand for RoN). Ecuador’s pioneering constitution of 2008, which serves as a role model for civil society initiatives worldwide, would not have come about without indigenous and other social movements. The Spanish Mar Menor Lagoon was granted legal personhood in 2022, because tens of thousands of people supported the legal initiative. The same goes for recognitions in Colombia, Aotearoa New Zealand, India and other places worldwide, where courts or parliaments have granted rights to nature. In all these cases civil society played an important role and continues to do so in enforcement of the RoN. Interestingly, law seems to be the most promising approach for them to achieve social change.
In the beginning, civil society actors used the idea of RoN in a close context to concrete court cases like the lawsuit initiated by the Sierra Club on behalf of the Mineral King Valley to prevent the construction of a ski resort. Or the attempt in 1988 of nine environmental associations to obtain legal protection on behalf of the seals of the North Sea before a German administrative court. Even though the courts dismissed the cases, the ski area was not built and the permits, on which the environmental destruction of the North Sea was based, were not renewed. These examples show in passing that strategic litigation can be a promising tool for civil society. But also, legal acts play an important role in the development of RoN. In 2006, a statute passed by Tamaqua Borough in the US state of Pennsylvania became the first legal act to recognize independent rights of an ecosystem. Originally, the company had planned to dispose toxic sewage sludge into the environment. To counteract this environmentally damaging action, the municipality of Tamaqua Borough passed a statute, in which ecosystems were recognized as legal entities to enforce their own subjective rights. Ultimately, this created a foundation for the ecosystem to defend itself. In the following years, national legal systems and national courts recognised RoN all over the world.
Rights of Nature and Human Rights
The Statute of Tamaqua Borough was a direct reaction to a local conflict over environmentally harmful actions, conducted by a company. Many people in vulnerable situations, civil society organizations and other actors are using rights of nature to defend themselves or nature against injustices resulting from the overexploitation of planet Earth. The loss of habitats, the extinction of species and many other environmental damages have their origin largely in industrial agriculture, mining and other excesses of globalization. Through the exploitation of nature, local and indigenous people often lose their land, their homes and in the end their entire livelihood. Human rights violations and encroachments on the RoN, therefore, often go hand in hand. For this reason, it only makes sense that RoN also have an impact on the understanding of Human Rights itself. An important example therefore is the Advisory Opinion OC-23/17 of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in which the Court emphasizes the interrelationship between human rights and the environment what makes it for him necessary to protect the components of the environment “as legal interests in themselves”.
Obstacles and Challenges, Pros and Cons
It may be surprising that law is seen as a suitable means to achieve the necessary social change. Although, as Bruno Latour describes, law encompasses everything, it still only reflects a small area of society. At the same time, the law is convincing by the fact that if RoN are actually implemented in the legal systems, legal certainty can be granted in this respect, and future individual cases can always be placed in the overall context. The simultaneity of security and changeability of law is illustrated by the example of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The ECHR is understood as a “living instrument” and therefore its interpretation must always consider the current social context. These efficacies of law make RoN not only an attractive tool for social movements but also for juridical decisions. This is illustrated by the newest rulings of the Erfurter Landgericht proclaimed August and October 2024, where RoN were used as protection-enhancing (schutzverstärkend) and therefore promotes the discussion and inclusion of a more nature-based approach in juridical decisions.
Many scholars highlight the procedural character of RoN, as they can be seen as an example of the struggles for a new “law from below”. In the struggle for RoN social, indigenous and environmental movements can articulate their demands in the transnational space in a way that they can be taken up by the law. But on the other hand, the reception of rights of nature in the legal system seems to conflict with the character of social movements as more or less “spontaneous”, fluid and non-State actors. The juridification – or even constitutionalization – of RoN harbours the danger that State institutions or institutionalized NGOs occupy the role of nature’s representatives and in turn shape the character of those rights through their perspective only. Thus, “law from below” is always in danger of becoming just another “law from above”.
As this already shows, the discourse on RoN is not free of challenges and obstacles. Various questions such as the definition of “nature” or about the ability and permission of representation need to be a subject matter of an interdisciplinary discourse. For example on one hand the allowance of everybody to make claims in the name of nature in Art. 71 Par. 2 of the Ecuadorian could mean democratization and could offer the advantage of an assembly of many different voices which, through procedural approximation, can at least come close to the impossible task of truly representing the interests of nature. However, broad participation rights could also harbour the risk of abuse. They rely on ideal discourse, which encompassed as many voiced as possible, as to create a nearly ideal representation of nature’s interests. But if, in practice, only those actors are involved, who have both the financial and structural prerequisites, this ideal can be distorted.
Prospect of Rights of Nature
The examples all over the world clearly show that the RoN need to reflect on the historical, social and cultural background of the country and their people and communities. The basic theoretical assumptions and conceptions on which the reasons for RoN are based may differ. But this reflects the chances of rebuilding and transforming our understanding of rights. Regarding the scale and efficacy of RoN, court procedures can therefore be seen as equally, if not more important than the process of legislation itself. Material and procedural law are two sides of the same coin, intertwined and reflecting on one another. Following the understanding of RoN not only as an extension of the existing system of subjective rights, but, at least to some extent, as a revision and development of it (Gutmann, p. 263), the struggle for and the definition of “Rights of Nature” must not stop once they are recognized. On the contrary, the legal struggle around RoN does not end, but merely begins with their legal recognition (Gutmann, p. 98 f.).
The symposium will shed a light on these struggles. It will provide insights in current debates about implementation and enforcement of RoN on different places around the globe.
