In 2025, a municipality in the Peruvian Amazon passed a unanimous ordinance that resonated globally. Stingless bees—native insects with a history spanning millennia in these tropical forests—became the first insects to be recognised as legal subjects.
These bees join a list that continues to expand. In Colombia, the Atrato River, a river polluted by illegal mining, was granted rights in 2016. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River, sacred to the Māori people, became a living entity with legal personality in 2017. In Panama, sea turtles were recognised as beings with intrinsic value and a right to protection.
Different cases, different countries, different species—yet all point in the same direction. In the legal codes of the world, nature is shifting from its status as a resource to become a subject in its own right.
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To understand the implications of a bee holding rights, one must begin with the fundamentals: what is a legal subject? In juridical terms, it is an entity that can hold rights and, consequently, be represented in court when those rights are violated.
Until recently, this category was the exclusive preserve of individuals and legal entities such as corporations or institutions. The rights of nature movement seeks to broaden this definition.
This is not a novel concept. The debate took shape in 2008, when Ecuador incorporated the recognition of Pachamama (Mother Earth) as a legal subject into its Constitution. Bolivia followed suit a year later.
Nature is moving away from being a mere resource in global legal codes to become a subject in its own right.
However, it was in 2017 that the concept truly captured international headlines. That year, the Constitutional Court of Colombia recognised the rights of the Atrato River, which had been severely contaminated by illegal mining. That same year, the New Zealand Parliament granted legal personality to the Whanganui River, following a century of advocacy by the Whanganui Iwi.
Since then, the map of recognition has continued to grow. Colombian courts have granted rights to more than ten rivers and designated the Amazon as an “entity subject to rights” concerning protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration. In Peru, the Marañón River—sacred to the Kukama Kukamiria and plagued by frequent oil spills—and Lake Titicaca have followed this path. Even in nations such as India and Bangladesh, courts have issued rulings in a similar vein.
The concept of nature as a legal subject, which until recently appeared to be a phenomenon unique to Latin America, is now beginning to gain ground in other parts of the world.
What appeared, until recently, to be a phenomenon restricted to Latin America is beginning to take hold elsewhere. In 2022, Spain recognised the legal personality of the Mar Menor lagoon, making it the first European ecosystem to hold its own rights.
Furthermore, in 2024, a German court explicitly cited precedents from Ecuador and Colombia in its own judgements. In a recent analysis, the jurist Marie-Christine Fuchs described this phenomenon as a “reverse legal transplant”—legal principles emerging in the Global South that now serve as inspiration for the Global North.
Beyond the regulatory specifics, these cases share a deeper philosophical shift. For decades, environmental law has viewed nature through a transactional lens: a resource to be managed, a stock to be sustainably exploited, and a system to be protected only when its collapse posed a risk to human society.
The rights of nature movement proposes a different outlook: that a river, a forest, or even a bee possesses intrinsic value, regardless of its utility to mankind.
For Constanza Prieto Figelist, Latin American legal director for the Earth Law Center—an organisation that has participated in several of these landmark cases—”it is not just about changing laws, but about transforming how we understand our relationship with other members of the planetary community.” As she stated in an interview with activesustainability.com, “the rights of nature are a way of reimagining protection. Beyond merely avoiding harm, the diverse values of ecosystems are now recognised", said in an interview with activesustainability.com
In recent years, the jurist David Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment between 2018 and 2024, has helped refine this argument. In his book, The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World, he argues that laws evolve alongside societal values. In this sense, this shift is less a rupture and more an evolution of legal thought, accelerated by the urgency of the climate crisis.
In 1972, the American jurist Christopher Stone was the first to put forward a serious case that “society should grant legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called ‘natural objects’.”
The idea has deep roots. In 1972, the American jurist Christopher Stone, in his book Should Trees Have Standing?, was the first to seriously propose that “society should grant legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.”
However, experts also warn of current limitations. David Lovatón, legal advisor to the Due Process of Law Foundation (DPLF), points out that in the case of the Atrato River in Colombia, compliance has been inconsistent. “In Latin America, in general, there is low enforcement of judicial rulings,” he told Mongabay.
Granting nature the status of a legal person is not a panacea. It is an attempt to move beyond the anthropocentrism that has dominated modern legal systems and which has, to a large extent, facilitated decades of environmental degradation without real legal consequences.
Nevertheless, the proponents of the movement admit that formal recognition is only the beginning. A river with rights that remains polluted is still a polluted river.
The ultimate question facing the movement is not whether nature deserves rights, but whether legal systems and the political will behind them are truly capable of enforcing them.
Sources:
- https://dplf.org/aportes-derechos-de-la-naturaleza/
- https://co.boell.org/sites/default/files/2021-04/Derechos%20de%20la%20naturaleza%20Web.pdf
- https://elpais.com/america-futura/2026-03-04/rosa-vasquez-espinoza-las-abejas-nos-obligaron-a-cambiar-la-forma-de-hacer-ciencia.html
- https://ecojurisprudence.org/initiatives/principle-of-environmental-precaution-and-its-application-to-protect-peoples-right-to-health/
- https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-39291759
- https://ecojurisprudence.org/es/iniciativas/ley-panamena-de-proteccion-de-las-tortugas-marinas-y-sus-habitats/