Experts suggest granting legal rights to animals, trees, rivers. How does it work?

As the climate crisis is worsening, legal requirements are a must-have to govern human-nature interactions. In other words, giving legal rights to non-human entities such as animals, trees and rivers. 

This is the solution outlined in Law in the Emerging Bio Age, a report suggesting steps to tackle environmental issues. The report has been prepared by the Law Society of England and Wales along with the research group Jigsaw Foresight. The purpose of the report is “meaningful coexistence” and “new alliances” for cooperation instead of competition.

What does this mean exactly? Obviously, this does not mean that tomorrow, trees and rivers would approach the courthouse in cases of environmental degradation! But what the report’s suggestion of granting these rights aims at is bringing about an entire recalibration of “law in the Bio Age”. 

To quote the summary of the 27-page-long report, “The process and execution of a nonhuman rights-based framework in international and local law may differ radically from a human rights-based approach. For example, if rights were granted to nonhumans or living systems, then questions of liability for damage to the environment, such as climate change or biodiversity loss, arise.” 

In simpler words, studying environment-specific rights for such nonhuman entities is highly-required for the training of future lawyers. 

The Law Society hosted two roundtable discussions with legal professionals and environmental experts to come to a multi-point proposal with one of the crucial points being: 

Of course, a lot of the report’s suggestions merely suggest a blueprint and it is uncertain how these empathetic outlooks towards the environment can exactly be embedded into global legal terminology. 

Rights for non-humans: The report also gives examples of how we tend to individualise or empathise with particular animals or natural bodies in times of crisis. The Save Tiger Project, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Save Aarey forest campaign, can be a few Indian examples in this context. 

“Positive human feelings for ‘charismatic’ nonhumans influence innovation and policy too, e.g. investment in new technology to talk to whales, people sending emails to trees, campaigns to ‘Save our English Oaks’.” The report reads further suggesting how granting legal rights to such non-humans would help such campaigns in gaining more validity and voice in the courtroom. 

In this way, nature on its own can be included in decision-making around environmental concerns (with bio-lawyers as nature’s human representatives). 

Ecuador is the first and only country to grant animals legal rights: Even though the report’s suggestions might seem too First World-like for all countries to apply, the South American nation Ecuador had already granted legal rights to animals this April, the first country to do so. 

The conversation started when a woolly monkey Estrellita was illegally snatched away from her natural habitat when she was merely a month old. She was then kept in a private household as a pet for 18 years. After Ecuadorian authorities seized the monkey, they placed her in zoo care where she died a month later.

Since then, Estrellita’s “rights” came into question with librarian Ana Beatriz Burbano Proaño (who kept the monkey and taught her to communicate through gestures and sounds) filing a habeas corpus petition. Her perspective was that the monkey grew distressed in an unknown environment (the zoo) and had been too acclimatised to her usual home (Proaño’s home). 

While this conversation totally shifted away from the fact that a woolly monkey should have never been taken away from a forest in the first place, the country’s high court issued a verdict in February in Estrellita’s favour saying that “wild animals possess the legal right to exist, develop their innate instincts, and be free from disproportionate cruelty, fear, and distress”. 

Possession of wild animals is still an illegal practice in the country, the very reason the authorities snatched away Estrellita from the librarian. Regardless, Estrellita’s death prompted the landmark decision and the court stated the Ecuadorian Environment Ministry should develop new rules and methods to ensure an animal's rights are respected and upheld. 

The situation in other parts of the world: It was American environmentalist and scientist Christopher Stone who was one of the earliest proponents of legal rights for trees, asking for the government to recognise them as legally-protected individuals back in the 1980s. 

On paper, rights of nature are enshrined in constitutions of several countries but such specific legal wording (as the British report suggests) still seems Utopian for now. In the meantime, developed countries like Canada and New Zealand (and several American cities) have local laws that give a few specific wild animals protection. 

For instance, in November 2021, the UK gave legal recognition to several invertebrates, including lobsters, octopuses and crabs, as “sentient beings”. Still, this recognition is yet to be applied at the constitutional level. In neighbouring Ireland, Party for Animal Welfare calls itself “Ireland's Only Official Registered Political Party For Animals”. 

How would developing countries like India respond to such suggestions? Also, would the suggestions actually bring about a change or just remain on-paper statements? The answers to these questions, only time can tell. 

To quote Christopher Stone’s 1972 magnum opus Should Trees Have Standing?: Law, Morality, and the Environment,