In Western legal systems, arguments against pollution or the destruction of the environment tend to focus exclusively on people: It’s wrong to contaminate a river, for example, because certain humans depend on the river for drinking water.
But what if the river had an inherent right to be protected from pollution, regardless of its utility to humans? This is the idea that drives the “rights of nature” movement, a global campaign to recognize the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature — not just rivers, but also trees, mountains, animals, ecosystems — by granting it legal rights. Many Indigenous worldviews already recognize these rights. The question for many in the movement, however, is how to bring the rights of nature into the courtroom.
Enter the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, a recurring gathering of Indigenous and environmental advocates who present arguments regarding alleged violations of the rights of nature and Indigenous peoples. Given international law’s broad failure to recognize the rights of nature, the events provide a model showing what this type of jurisprudence could look like.
At the sixth tribunal in Toronto late last month, a panel of nine judges heard cases against Canadian mining companies, ultimately ruling that they had violated “collective rights, Indigenous rights, and rights of nature.”
“Today’s testimonies have emphasized the age-old stories of greed, colonization, … and the ongoing ecocide caused by the extractive industries,” said Casey Camp-Horinek, an elder of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma and one of the tribunal’s judges. She and the other judges called for the ratification of a United Nations treaty on business and human rights, a report from U.N. experts on critical minerals and Indigenous peoples’ rights, and further consideration of mining’s impacts at the U.N.’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
Those recommendations and the verdict against the mining companies are set to be presented later this year at COP30 in Brazil — the United Nations’ annual climate change conference — where the tribunal judges hope their findings will pressure countries to develop legal protections for nature and Indigenous peoples.
Mining was selected as the theme of this tribunal because of the damage that resource extraction can cause to people and ecosystems, even though the sector is necessary for addressing climate change. Minerals like lithium and copper are needed in large quantities for electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and other renewable technologies to replace fossil fuels. A previous session of the tribunal, held in New York City last September, focused on oil and gas infrastructure.
Canadian companies were singled out because of their prominence in the global mining sector. According to a recent report by the nonprofit MiningWatch Canada, the country is home to more than 1,300 mining and exploration companies, 730 of which operate overseas. About half of the world’s public mining companies are listed on Canadian stock exchanges.
Courtesy of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature
The tribunal was also meant to contrast with this week’s annual conference of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, which featured climate change and Indigenous issues in a way that speakers described as opportunistic — by now a familiar criticism.
James Yap, the tribunal’s prosecutor and acting director of an international human rights program at the University of Toronto, called out one particular event titled “Caliente Caliente Ooh Aah: Latin American Mining is Heating Up!,” which invited attendees to “dance to the Latin beat through the various regulatory issues affecting the region.”
Neither the law firm that organized the Latin American mining event nor the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada responded to Grist’s requests for comment.
Jérémie Gilbert, a professor of social and ecological justice at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, applauded the tribunal for building an evidence base of the alleged human rights and nature’s rights violations by transnational mining companies. His research has highlighted how most international law treats nature as a resource to be owned or exploited, instead of having value in its own right.
Legal protections that include Indigenous knowledge and the rights of nature have already been implemented in several countries — most famously in Ecuador, which in its rewritten 2008 constitution acknowledged the rights of Mother Earth, or Pacha Mama, to the “maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.”
“What’s required for the rights of nature is a pen and then enforceability,” said Dov Korff-Korn, the legal director of Sacred Defense Fund, an Indigenous environmental group based in Santa Fe. Korff-Korn said that giving rights to nonhuman entities like water, animals, and plants is already baked into how many tribes see the world, so using tribal laws and respecting sovereignty is a way forward.
“We’ve got some unique rights and laws that have unique expressions,” said Frank Bibeau, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe and a tribal attorney with the nonprofit Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights who has worked on cases that give rights to nonhuman relatives under Chippewa treaties.
Sebastian Rojas Rojo / AFP via Getty Images
One example came during the fight against the controversial Line 3 Pipeline proposed by the oil and gas company Enbridge in Minnesota. Bibeau listed manoomin, Ojibwe for wild rice, as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, arguing that the rice had rights to clean water and habitat that would be jeopardized by the pipeline and the oil spill risks it would bring.
Bibeau said the lawsuit is an example of how many tribes see the rights inherent in nature. But since most settler courts don’t, he argues that Indigenous treaties are a useful way to help protect nonhuman relatives.
Other ways to develop legal protections could involve tribal courts. And this year in Aotearoa, or New Zealand, the mountain Taranaki Maunga was recognized as a legal person because the Maori see it as an ancestor. The country also recognizes the rights of the Te Irewera Forest and the Whanganui River, so there is a developing global precedent for this sort of legal framework.
Protections like these could protect ecosystems in the examined cases of the tribunal, including in Brazil where a firm called Belo Sun has proposed the development of the country’s largest open-pit gold mine, and in regions affected by copper, silver, and other metals mining throughout Ecuador. One of the cases heard by tribunal judges related to a gold mine proposed in eastern Serbia by the Canadian company Dundee Precious Metals, and another centered on uranium mining within Canada.
In a presentation about heavy metals mining in Penco, Chile, Valerie Sepúlveda — president of a Chilean environmental nonprofit called Parque para Penco — criticized the Toronto-based Aclara Resources for opaque operations and a failure to engage with residents near its mines. “We must reevaluate what mining is really necessary and which is not,” she told the audience. One of the judges, in describing the 2015 release of millions of liters of cyanide solution from a gold mine in San Juan, Argentina, said mining companies are “sacrificing these towns so that Americans can have their Teslas.”
Another judge — Tzeporah Berman, international program director at the nonprofit Stand.earth — told attendees she was “horrified and embarrassed” by the practices of Canadian mining companies. “Canada must pursue human and environmental due diligence,” she added while delivering her verdict. “I hope that our recommendations will be used in future policy design and legal challenges.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Canada, Indigenous advocates argue mining companies violate the rights of nature on Mar 10, 2025.
