Year: 2021
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Between 2016 and 2020, a number of courts issued rulings recognizing the rights of rivers and lakes in Bangladesh (all rivers); Colombia (the Atrato, Cauca, Cocora, Coello, Combeima, La Plata, Magdalena, and Quindio Rivers, and Tota Lake); and India (the Ganga, or Ganges, and Yamuna Rivers and Sukhna Lake).What makes these rights of Nature (RoN) legal provisions different from the others mentioned so far in this book is that Bangladesh, Colombia, and India do not recognize rights for these ecosystems in their constitutions, national laws, or subnational laws. 1 Rather, judges in these three countries issued rulings recognizing the rivers and lakes as legal persons, moving them from "right-less to rights-bearing" entities (Margil 2017, 27).This chapter examines court rulings recognizing the rights of the Atrato River in Colombia and the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India, and specifically the unique institutional structures mandated to protect those rights.2 These cases provide a valuable lens for analyzing the politics of implementing Earth jurisprudence for three reasons.First, these cases show the diffusion of the legal personhood model pioneered in New Zealand, and also show how the model evolved as it was adapted to fit varying unique conditions.Second, the cases show how RoN jurisprudence is evolving as a result of this experimentation, with an emphasis on the role of judicial interpretation.In this way the chapter builds on
Source: The MIT Press eBooks
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4239837243