Legal Personality for Nature: From National to International Law

More and more frequently national Constitutions and legislative acts or decisions of national courts recognize specific natural/cultural entities, ecosystems, nature itself and certain animals as having rights. Such recognitions are intended to improve the protection of these “items” from both an environmental and a cultural, sometimes spiritual and religious, point of view. Notwithstanding the interconnections between the recognition of rights and the recognition of legal personality, the present chapter will focus mainly on questions concerning the granting of international legal personhood. The aim is to investigate whether the national model of legal personhood granted to natural/cultural entities and animals is exportable in international law, whether it may be useful and which problems would accompany such eventual recognition. The chapter, in particular, analyses the analogies with the case of individuals whose international legal personality is still controversial. As for individuals, the recognition of natural/cultural entities and animals as international subjects strictly depends on the will of States. The latter seem rather reluctant to undertake legal obligations at the international level concerning such recognition. And above all the possibility for entities and animals to put in motion procedures at the international level in order to obtain the protection of their rights is far from reality. Difficulties may also arise about the legal representation of entities and animals, their heterogeneous nature and the fact that in exercizing their rights the will of entities and animals would be, always and inevitably, filtered through the will of individuals. In the light of these and other peculiar problems and of States’ practice, the conclusions concerning the international legal personality of nature can only be pessimistic, at least at present. However, something is progressively changing in the way nature’s protection is conceived and attempts to reshaping the relationship between human beings and nature have also been made internationally.