It is a diffuse but powerful movement, a low-noise revolution that began ten years ago, and which now extends to twenty countries. From Ecuador to Uganda, from India to New Zealand, by constitutional, legislative or jurisprudential means, rivers, mountains, forests are gradually being recognized as legal persons, when it is not nature as a whole – the Pachamama (Mother Earth) – which is promoted as a subject of law. Until then rather limited to regions where indigenous populations live, this legal development was extended for the first time to a European country, on September 21, 2022, with the vote by the Spanish Senate of the rights of the Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon located on the shores of the Mediterranean, near Murcia, Spain. A “significant first step” who “shows that granting legal personality to an ecosystem in Europe is possible”says Maria Teresa Vicente Gimenez, professor of law at the University of Murcia.
This international momentum is echoed by several initiatives in France, often carried out by groups of inhabitants, to proclaim and defend the rights of rivers: the Tavignano river in Corsica, the Garonne in New Aquitaine or the Têt river in the Pyrenees. -Orientales. These claims are accompanied by a rich editorial production, which explores the legal issues (rights for nature, collective, Utopia Editions, 2018), the philosophical foundations (to be the riverSacha Bourgeois-Gironde, PUF, 2020), political extensions (The river that wanted to write. Hearings of 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 (The Rights of Nature. Towards a new paradigm for the protection of lifeLe Pommier, 2022, 468 pages, 24 euros).
However, this change faces strong opposition. The idea of giving rights to natural entities is hotly debated in legal circles, where specialists in environmental law are concerned about the risks and abuses it could entail. Some opponents do not hesitate to compare it to the animal trials of the Middle Ages, where pigs were condemned to hang or weevils to excommunication for having attacked crops. The more nuanced consider it to be“a bad answer to a good question”, according to the formula of the lawyer and professor of environmental law Arnaud Gossement.
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