Indigenous people approve law to give Rio citizen rights – 06/22/2023 – Environment

“The intrinsic rights of the Laje River —Komi-Memen— are recognized as a living entity and subject of rights, and of all other bodies of water and living beings that naturally exist in it or with whom it interrelates, including human beings. human beings, insofar as they are interrelated in an interconnected, integrated and interdependent system.”

This is how the City Council of Guajará-Mirim (RO) defined Laje in the first law in Brazil that recognizes the legal rights of a river.

According to the text of the municipal law, the river has the right to “maintain its natural flow”, “to nourish and “be nourished”, “to exist with its physico-chemical conditions adequate to its ecological balance” and to relate to human beings as long as “of its spiritual, leisure, artisanal, agroecological and cultural fishing practices”.

The proposal was authored by councilor Francisco Oro Waram (PSB), leader of the Waram village, which is located in the Lage river region. It is an Amazon river called by the indigenous people of Komi-Memen and which flows into the Madeira, which in turn feeds the Amazon.

The granting of these prerogatives to the river follows a chain of recognizing nature itself as the holder of rights, going beyond the regulation of its exploitation by human beings.

The thesis starts from the principle that the environment has rights inherent to its existence, which must be recognized in legislation just like those of citizens.

In 2018, the Sheet told the story of the first municipality to adopt the understanding for its nature. This was the case of Bonito, in Pernambuco.

Since then, four more cities in the country have instituted similar provisions in their legal framework: Paudalho (PE), Florianópolis (SC), Serro (MG) and Guajará-Mirim —the norm granting rights to nature in the city of Rondônia was approved around a month before that of the river Laje.

The states of Santa Catarina, Minas Gerais, Paraíba and Pará also have more or less advanced legislative proposals in this regard.

Outside the country, the Ghandi River, in India, has already had rights recognized by a similar initiative, as well as the Whanganui River, in New Zealand. There are also cities in the United States that have followed the same path.

The pioneers in this regard are Ecuador and Bolivia, which since 2008 and 2010, respectively, created laws at the national level to grant rights to the environment.

“The River Laje is our life, our mother, it provides our fish, our survival”, says councilor Francisco.

The new law provides for the creation of a committee of river guardians, made up of members of the indigenous community, fishermen, the Oro Wari organization, indigenous women artisans and the Federal University of Rondônia.

The intention is for the body to be the representative of the rights of the river and be consulted before undertakings that affect its waters, for example.

Waran says that his main concerns about the river are hydroelectric projects along its course and the advance of soybean planting, which he says uses pesticides that can contaminate the water.

According to the councilor, the monoculture plantations are already on the border of the Igarapé Lage Indigenous Land, where Wari indigenous people live.

“Today the indigenous community is threatened by invaders who deforest the forests, by illegal fishermen and by land grabbers. The soy plantation is at the door of our village and the hydroelectric plants are also threatening the river. We are going to use the new law to have a voice, now companies will have to consult us first [antes de tentar algum empreendimento]”, it says.

The councilor had the support of Vanessa Hasson and Fabiana Leme, lawyers and founders of the NGO Mapa-Caminhos para a Paz.

They say that the implementation of a law like that of Guajará-Mirim helps not only to provide more legal devices for the preservation and development of the environment, but also helps to raise awareness of the population on the subject.

“When you recognize the rights of nature, you contribute to the expansion of awareness that there is interdependence between beings in nature, including human beings”, says Hasson.

“In the legal argument, with this type of law you add to the legislation that harming this river is inappropriate due to its characteristic of having intrinsic rights. It is the river’s right for itself, not for being at the service of something”, he completes.

The legislative text, they report, was constructed with the intention of translating the knowledge and cosmological understanding of indigenous and traditional peoples about nature into the legal language of non-indigenous people.

“The rights of nature are a legal translation of the cosmovisions of indigenous, traditional and original peoples. It is to empower these communities that it is possible to have one more legal instrument at their side”, completes Leme.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}