Regarding the rights of nature – Liberation

On April 30, 2025, Colbert Salle of the National Assembly, was held the first conference of its kind on the rights of nature. In an amphitheater fills, an auditor posed: « But what is blocking in lawyers on the rights of nature? »

Ironically, we were there-with the lawyer Marine Yzquierdo and researcher Marie-Angèle Hermitte-to present the advances of experts on the subject and announce the creation of the first dedicated think tank, the « circle of lawyers for the rights of nature ». I received this question as a form of aggression mixed with a feeling of injustice towards our community. Would we have missed the Defense of Nature’s appointment?

I wish to answer it, first recalling that the lawyers are indeed there – and that they have always been.

It is in the minds of a Californian law professor that the « rights of nature » was born, with a visionary article: Should Trees have standing ? This text aimed at the United States Supreme Court, seized with a ski resort project threatening a valley of hundred-year-olds.

The same year, 1972, also marked a turning point for environmental law, with the first top of the earth in Stockholm. From that time, lawyers were there. They pose the first stones of a right that has since become full discipline. In France, the French Society for Environmental Law (SFDE) was created in 1974. followed the Environment Code (2,000), then the Environment Charter (2,005). It is difficult to encrypt the environmental standards in force, but this density has also become its weakness for users faced with an often too complex right.

Today, many still oppose rights of nature and environmental law. It’s a mistake. The rights of nature – while extending human rights – on the contrary, offer an entry into environmental law.

Beyond the Franco-French debates on their limits or their risks, the recognition of natural entities as subjects of law has materialized internationally: the Pasha Mama in the Ecuadorian Constitution (2,008), then in Bolivia (2,010); The Whanganui rivers in New Zealand, ATRATO in Colombia (2,017), and the Mar Menor lagoon in Spain (2,022).

This cartography sketches a paradigm shift: the recognition, by law, of the intrinsic value of nature.

Should you see a tyranny or a legal trap? No.

But as often, such a change – especially in law – takes time. The example of ecological damage attests to it: more than thirty years have passed between the first doctrinal discussions and its recognition, during yet another case of pollution: that of theErika. From the criminal court to the Court of Cassation, everything is discussed, debated, enlightened. Then comes the law, and the ecological damage enters the civil code. Thus goes law, according to his own temporality.

What is still lacking in the rights of nature are diversified theoretical approaches. They gradually emerge.

For my part, I affirm that the question of rights should not be confused with that of legal personality. Still centered on humans, the models displayed combine the rights to a personality. However, it is precisely this link that hinders many of us.

To dispel this difficulty, we have worked the rights of nature to the compass of the commons. These rights are protected values, not people. We then carried our study in the Ciron valley, where a primary forest, which some call the lascals of biodiversity, is threatened. Deciding on its protection concerns us all.

It was a question of coinciding a legally protected interest and the ability to request its legal protection. The first corresponds to a subjective right – a recognized interest in an entity, subject or support. The second is the faculty of acting in court that legal personality gives.

Innovation? The river becomes an « environmental common good »; She has rights without being a person. Besides, when rights appear in litigation, it is under the leadership of citizens confronted with destructive projects. Legal personality takes shape in collective action.

To those who still ask us what the lawyers do for the rights of nature, I answer: we are there.

The rights of nature will not settle everything. But some of us think they open a new path of justice – an uncertain path, to go together. They remind us of a forgotten obvious: nature is us.