Ecuador Constitutional Assembly Votes to Approve Rights of Nature In New Constitution

Legal Defense Fund: Ecuador First Nation in the World to Shift to Rights-Based Environmental Protection Using Legal Defense Fund Support

Ecuadorians Follow Lead of U.S. Communities Partnering With Legal Defense Fund

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 7, 2008

On July 7, 2008, the Ecuador Constitutional Assembly - composed of one hundred and thirty (130) delegates elected countrywide to rewrite the country's Constitution - voted to approve articles for the new constitution recognizing rights for nature and ecosystems.

"If adopted in the final constitution by the people, Ecuador would become the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights," stated Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

"Ecuador is now leading the way for countries around the world to make this necessary and fundamental change in how we protect nature," added Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Legal Defense Fund.

Over the past year, the Legal Defense Fund has been invited to assist Delegates to the Ecuador Constitutional Assembly to re-write that country's constitution. Delegates requested that the Legal Defense Fund draft proposed Rights of Nature language for the constitution based on ordinances developed and adopted by municipalities in the United States.

The Legal Defense Fund has now assisted communities in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Virginia to draft and adopt new laws that change the status of natural communities and ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities.

Those local laws recognize that natural communities and ecosystems possess an inalienable and fundamental right to exist and flourish, and that residents of those communities possess the legal authority to enforce those rights on behalf of those ecosystems. In addition, these laws require the local governments to remedy violations of those ecosystem rights.

In essence, these laws represent changes to the status of property law, eliminating the authority of a property owner to interfere with the functioning of ecosystems and natural communities that exist and depend upon that property for their existence and flourishing. The local laws allow certain types of development that do not interfere with the rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish.

Background

The Legal Defense Fund, created in 1995 as a public interest law firm, works with communities that recognize that environmental protection cannot be attained under a structure of law that treats natural communities and ecosystems as mere property.

By most every measure, the environment today is in worse shape than when the major U.S. environmental laws were adopted over thirty years ago. Since then, countries around the world have sought to replicate these laws. Yet, species decline worldwide is increasing exponentially, global warming is far more accelerated than previously believed, deforestation continues unabated around the world, and overfishing in the world's oceans is pushing many fisheries to collapse.

These laws - including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and similar state laws - legalize environmental harms by regulating how much pollution or destruction of nature can occur under law. Rather than preventing pollution and environmental destruction, these laws instead codify it. In addition, under commonly understood terms of preemption, once these activities are legalized by federal or state governments, local governments are prohibited from banning them.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is the only public interest law firm in the U.S. that specializes in building a body of law focused on establishing rights for nature. In pursuit of that goal, the Legal Defense Fund has served as special legal counsel to over one hundred municipal governments across the U.S., and serves as a legal advisor to organizations and governments in other countries, including Ecuador, who are focused on driving similar laws into their governing frameworks.