Type: book-chapter
Abstract: What does a river as a legal person do that couldn't be done before?Do rivers, once framed as legal persons, intervene differently in legal and political processes?I explore these questions by looking at three things, based around the recent judgments in favour of river rights in the Constitutional Court of Ecuador and the experience of Te Awa Tupua Act (2017), Aotearoa New Zealand.First, I am interested in how rivers are understood in different ways and how legal personality mediates between these (resource, kin, intrinsic value, ecological flow, and so on).Second, I ask how communities are framed in terms of their relationship with water.And lastly, I consider how Courts or legislative processes make politics by constructing different communities whose rights and interests can never perfectly align.I argue that different concepts rely on different hierarchies of values, which will never be shared by everyone.In practice, the cases I analyse show a hierarchy of rights as well as a hierarchy of communities and their relative value in that context.These three angles allow for a more precise understanding of the relationship between ideas of community and legal personality, as well as the interplay between human rights and the rights of rivers.
Source: ORBi UMONS
Author: Tanasescu, Mihnea
Institution: University of Mons
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212197996