From Moral Crusade to European Reality: The Rights of Nature “Solution” in Search of a Problem
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: By what sleight of hand could the simple idea of personifying nature and granting it rights outperform contemporary environmental law, a sophisticated normative edifice built over the last fifty years? This is the question that led me, about a decade ago, to engage critically with rights of nature. 1 In this essay, I focus on the concept from a European standpoint, without claiming to do full justice to the live debate over the concept in other jurisdictions, such as Latin America, New Zealand, and the United States. I challenge the claim that rights of nature offer a meaningful legal alternative to contemporary environmental law in Europe. The arguments advanced here, however, have broader relevance: European law — including under the European Convention on Human Rights — shows that effective protection of nature does not require personification, and the theoretical critiques of rights of nature are also relevant to the international debate. The argument that it might provide such an alternative rests on a form of ancient natural law thinking, and it carries a strong ideological charge that leads to a flawed diagnosis of what environmental law actually is and does. Rather than re-inventing environmental law through personification of nature, the pressing task is to sustain the existing legal framework.
Source: AJIL Unbound
Author: Julien Bétaille
Institution: Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7169729739