Thank you for sharing this valuable information.

Legal personality was already given to non-human entities - legal (juridical, moral) persons are example of such. Another is state organ or state as such. International Organisation. All of them are, non-human, however connected to human beings. Partially in some countries also to animals.

But to answer your question, I do not see legal obstacle why it would be impossible to grant legal personality to nature (namely passive - to have rights). But is would have to have some kind of curator, that will advocate and act for its rights.

I see advantage in that, that the nature would be protected for her own sake, and not because of consequences of its destruction on humans.

Thanks Lukas for your Your useful answer

Dear Doctor

Go To

Environmental Personhood as a Tool to Protect Nature

Martyna Łaszewska-Hellriegel

Philosophia (2023) 51:1369–1384

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00583-z

[The Concept of Environmental Personhood Jacques Derrida described the attempts to transfer human rights to animals and ecosystem(s) as “sympathetic but unsustainable naiveté” (Derrida & Roudinesco, 2006). Derrida’s critique was aimed at the moral-philosophical argumentations “so bound up with the outmoded paradigm of subjective reason that they could not sufficiently grasp the autonomous rights of nature or even of animals. Instead of the moral philosophical extensions to the system of subjective human rights, the concept of the legal subject itself as well as the idea of consciousness that is linked to the ability to articulate, should be reconsidered and transformed. This transformation should shift the meaning and allocation of rights, basic rights and also human rights in such a way that the environment and animals, i.e. non-human persons, are no longer “’right’-less” (Fischer-Lescano, 2020). In response, some have moved to assign legal standing directly to nature. In 1972, the law professor Christopher Stone penned an essay entitled “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” (Stone, 1972). It may feel beyond our collective imagination to give nature rights, but, as Stone writes, “throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been a bit unthinkable. Until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time“(Stone, 1972). To answer the question, if there are already enough law tools to successfully protect the nature or if more actions are needed, I will first trace the current trends in the juridical personification of non-human persons. Constitutional changes and different court cases will be looked at in order to ask whether and, if so, how the concept of a legal person can be usefully opened up for non-human and non-articulable legal persons. It is then examined, using the concept of the common heritage of mankind, what these findings mean for the question of access of non-human legal persons to the fundamental and human rights jurisdiction on the international level (FischerLescano, 2020).]