The Court Finds the Atrato Possesses Rights to “Protection, Conservation, Maintenance and Restoration”
Rights of Nature Movement Gaining Ground as Court Declares Need to Move Away from Legal Systems in which Humans are the “dominator of nature”
A Press Release from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from May 4, 2017.
MERCERSBURG, PA, USA: In November, in an extraordinary decision, Colombia’s Constitutional Court declared that the Atrato River basin possesses rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration.” The decision is only now being made public.
The Court’s ruling comes in a case brought to address the significant degradation of the Atrato River basin from mining, impacting nature and indigenous peoples.
Declaring that the river has rights comes after thousands of years of history in which nature has been treated as “property” or “right-less” under the law. Much like women, indigenous peoples, and slaves have been treated as property under the law, without legal rights, so today do legal systems treat nature. Under this system, environmental laws regulate human use of nature, resulting in the decline of species and ecosystems worldwide, and the acceleration of climate change. MORE…