Ocean Gets Legal Rights (Like Us!) – Here’s What It Means

In Ecuador, coastal marine ecosystems have been granted legal rights on an equal footing with humans and corporations, implying that authorities must put stricter limits on harmful activities, like commercial fishing, detrimental to marine life.

“The decision opens the door to a new perspective, a blue perspective, on the rights of nature,” explains Hugo Echeverria, an Ecuadorian lawyer who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of nature in the case.

As coastal marine ecosystems have intrinsic value, the Ecuadorian constitution has enshrined the right to “build a new form of citizen coexistence, in diversity and harmony with nature,” thus ensuring that their natural “life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes” are maintained through the adoption of sufficient protective measures to ensure those “vital processes” persist. In 2008, Ecuador became the world’s first country to recognize in a national constitution that nature has legal rights in the same capacity as humans and corporations. Ecuador, which includes the Galapagos archipelago, is home to hundreds of fish species, whales, sea turtles, dolphins, sharks, manta rays, and corals. The Constitutional Court ruled that nature comprises “interrelated, interdependent and indivisible” components, including the “human species.”  “When an element of nature is affected, the system’s functioning as a whole is altered.”