6. Rights of nature in Constitutional law - Hugo Echeverria

Hugo Echeverria is an attorney who has worked in environmental law since 2001, with an emphasis on biodiversity conservation, the environmental rule of law, and the rights of nature. He is a member of the UN Harmony with Nature, as well as the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law. Ecuador is the first, and still the only, country on the planet to recognize rights of nature in the constitution. Hugo has worked on a variety of cases to enforce this provision, contributing to some of the world's first jurisprudence on rights of nature. We talk about how it became possible for nature to be recognised as a rights holder in the constitution and how the Constitutional Court has weighed in lately to define what it means. Hugo describes some of the most significant cases, and discusses influence on international law systems. We also touch on the risk of the rights of nature being taken out at a potential revision of the constitution. Chapter 7, Article 71 in the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador: "Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes." Read the whole chapter on the rights of nature: https://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html Article in Science co-authored by Hugo: Science and the legal rights of nature (2023) https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/science-and-the-legal-rights-of-nature  Inside Climate on the marine coastal ecosystems ruling in the Constitutional Court of Ecuador: A Court Says Coastal Marine Ecosystems Have Intrinsic Value - and Legal Rights https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17012025/ecuador-constitutional-court-marine-ecosystem-rights/