Acuífero Como Sujeto De Derecho: Un Precedente Legal Brasileño
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The Right of Nature is increasingly reaffirming itself in the new Latin American constitutionalism by attributing legal personality to nature, to non-human subjects. This work discloses the pioneering spirit of granting an aquifer the status of subject of rights, in a worldwide unprecedented law, enacted on March 15, 2024, by the Cambuquira municipality, in the Minas Gerais state, Brazil. For this purpose, a documentary analysis of the law and a synthetic review of the literature were carried out, outlining considerations of environmental and civil legislation, with a focus on the subject of rights and on nature as a subject of rights in laws and judgments, based on international and national precedents. Next, it seeks to clarify groundwater and aquifers, the Carbogasous Water Aquifer in Cambuquira-MG and its recognition as a subject of rights by force of law. The Cambuquira municipality innovated in the national legal system by legislating the protection of groundwater and by granting the status of subject of rights to this aquifer, within the limits of its territory, as well as establishing a new precedent, both nationally and internationally, which will favor making groundwater visible and promoting greater protection thereof.
Authors: Luciana Cordeiro de Souza Fernandes, Alexandre Martins Fernandes
Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)
Language: Portuguese
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411375158