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Protecting animals, plants and habitats as entities with

legal personality

By Lt. Col. Bruno PETRICCIONE

Since an awareness of the importance of protecting ecological values emerged at the beginning of
last century, legislation protecting the relative tangible assets (areas with high ecological value) and
diffuse values (species, ecosystems and their respective relationships and processes) has sought a
balance between the need to protect these values in their own right and the need to protect them as
an opportunity for the socio-
economic and tourism
development of areas without
other possibilities for growth.
It was not until the end of the
20th century that the first
successful attempt to give
Nature an actual legal
personality at international level
saw the light, consisting in the
formal approval of the “World
Charter for Nature” by the
United Nations General Assembly in Montevideo in 1982. The Charter is based on the fundamental
principle that the environment and nature must be considered an indivisible whole, whose essential
ecological processes must be respected and not altered. Not legally binding, the Charter was drawn
up in declaratory terms using a general language, a fact which has clearly reduced the probability
that it be wholly or partly crystallized in common law. The Charter is, however, an instrument
declaredly based on ecological concepts, without anthropocentric connotations. While the aim of
other similar documents adopted by the UN was to protect the environment for the benefit of
humanity, this, on the other hand, now emphasized the need to protect nature as an end in itself.
Many years later, at national level, in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia (in force since 20
October 2008 and 7 February 2009
respectively), the rights of Nature were
regulated for the first time, establishing
an authentic “ecological
constitutionalism”. Nature went from
object to entity with legal rights and
obligations, opening up a new chapter
in the history of law (Baldin, 2014a).
Ecological restoration is considered as a
specific right of Nature, according to the
so-called “Earth jurisprudence”, the
philosophy of law that defends the rights
of the planet Earth. The great challenge of

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