News

On November 22 in Quito, Ecuador, the café El Cafecito hosted the event Minga Artística, organized by Luis Eslava and Jenny García Ruales from the Amazon of Rights Project, along with Viviana Morales Naranjo (UDLA). The event brought together artists, legal practitioners, collective and community members to engage in a dynamic exploration of collective art-making and legal knowledge-sharing. Drawing from the concept of minga—a practice rooted in Indigenous and Andean traditions emphasizing collective work —the event fostered interdisciplinary exchange and creative experimentation surrounding the Rights of Nature. 

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Delivered by Beatriz Abreu dos Santos, a socio-environmental researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Brasília and AgroParisTech, the talk explored the innovative role of youth activism in fostering socio-environmental governance. Drawing on her doctoral research and fieldwork in the Santarém region—an epicenter of territorial conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon—Beatriz highlighted how the Guardiões do Bem Viver collective is reshaping social movements and influencing local public policies.

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The Berlin Museum of Natural History hosted the panel discussion “Ecopolitics Traversing Waterbodies: Tales and Epistemologies Influencing Water Governance” as part of Berlin Science Week 2024.

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Forum Latin America—an Initiative within the Max Planck Law network—recently hosted the interdisciplinary conference ‘The Law & the Amazon: Challenges for a Sustainable Future’. Held on 17–18 October 2024 at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, the conference convened researchers across disciplines and civil society representatives to address the critical challenges facing the Amazon region as the heart of Latin America.

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This summer, Jenny García Ruales, Research Coordinator of the Amazon of Rights project, presented on the 16^th of September, her forthcoming chapter titled “Corazonando in the Amazon” during the RIFS (Research Institute for Sustainability, Potsdam) Summer School.

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The topic of the rights of nature is currently being discussed in many different places. In order to bring some of these discussion threads together, a "Rights of Nature Coffee Party" was held at the Faculty of Economics, Law and Social Sciences on 23 July 2024.

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The Popular University Legal Advice Center - NAJUP Cabano and the Legal Anthropology class of the Law department at UFOPA invited Cecilia Oliveira and Michael Riegener to a discussion about the project “Amazon of Rights: Understanding Ecocentric Normativity and its Social Realities through Visual Ethnography”.

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The rights of nature, a central concern of the Amazon of Rights project, are currently being discussed in many different jurisdictions in the Global South and the Global North. On 2 August 2024, the District Court (Landgericht) in Erfurt, Germany, became the first German court to recognise the rights of nature in the case 8 O 1373/21. The second case cited the Amazon of Rights project as an important reference point in current debates about the right of nature in Europe and internationally. The mention of rights of nature in this case may have potential ramifications for EU law and member states.

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From July 17 to July 19, 2024, the Kassel Institute for Sustainability hosted a workshop titled “Rights of Nature against whom? Obstacles and Problems in the Implementation of the Rights of Nature.” Jenny García Ruales and Prof. Dr. Michael Riegner from the University of Erfurt contributed to the workshop with their presentation titled “Amazon v Doe: Whom would the Amazon sue if it could?”

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On July 4–5, 2024, the annual conference "Verfassung und Recht in Übersee/World Comparative Law" convened at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, bringing together renowned scholars from around the globe to explore pressing issues in constitutional and comparative law.

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