The Spanish Mar Menor Lagoon was the guest of the second key moment of the International of Rivers on November 16, 2024, at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes. Its voice was carried by Teresa Vicente, a philosophy professor and initiator of the popular movement for the Mar Menor, and Eduardo Salazar, a lawyer and professor of public law, responsible for defending the "voice" of the ecosystem.
The Mar Menor, a lagoon in southern Spain threatened by numerous industries, is the first ecosystem in Europe to have been granted the status of "non-human person" through a 2022 law. How did this happen? What is the history of this lagoon and the law that made it a "subject of law"? How can we draw inspiration from this example?
December 2024
A wonderful piece of news...
The Constitutional Court in Spain has confirmed the 2022 law that granted legal personality to the Mar Menor lagoon. We now have a confirmed precedent in Europe to transform our cherished entities—our lakes, rivers, forests—into legal subjects with rights, aiming to shift the balance of power and counter the logic of other legal entities that exploit and abuse the world...
I share with you the first words of the message received from my companion Eduardo Salazar, lawyer, professor of public law at the University of Murcia, and the human voice of the Mar Menor lagoon...
Camille de Toledo
"I want to share with you very good news in Spain: the Constitutional Court endorse the Law 19/2022 of recognition of legal personhood and rights to the Mar Menor and its basin!!
… the law passed by Parliament in 2022 for the recognition of legal personality to the lagoon of the Mar Menor and its basin, a rule that was appealed by Vox. The importance of this ruling, debated by the court in its plenary session this week, derives from the greater protection it means for the ecosystem of the Mar Menor. The ruling was approved by 7 votes - those of the progressive sector - to 5, those of the conservative bloc of the guarantees body. With its ruling, the Constitutional Court upheld, among other aspects of the law, the fact that it ‘legitimises (...) any natural or legal person to bring legal (and also administrative) action on behalf of the Mar Menor, which will be the real interested party’. ‘It is a kind of universal general power of attorney, conferred ex lege (by provision of the law) to act in the interest of the new legal person’, which will facilitate the preservation and defence of the ecosystem.
The ruling - to which EL PAÍS has had access - reasons that the law under appeal is a singular rule that creates a new type of legal entity, a natural reality, seeking to attribute to it a series of powers in defence of its own existence and recovery. The ruling - for which the judge María Luisa Segoviano was the rapporteur - adds that despite being ‘a technique unknown until now in our environmental law’, it is not a technique unknown in comparative law. On the contrary, the ruling states, it is part of an international movement that has been on the rise in the last decade, which promotes ‘the development of innovative guarantee mechanisms based on an ecocentric paradigm that, for the moment, coexists with the traditional anthropocentric paradigm…."
