Rodrigo Rogelis
Credit: James Cave

In recent years there has been an explosion of mechanisms that have granted rights to rivers and other natural entities. While this is important to overcome the anthropocentrism that has characterised conventional law, the truth is that the real work begins once the declaration is achieved. Protecting and guaranteeing the rights of rivers is a complex process in which diverse actors, interests in tension, community needs and stakes, and the inertia of the state with its multiple problems and contradictions intersect. This is what the case of the Atrato river shows. It was the third river in the world to have rights thanks to the T-622 ruling and after seven years is an example of what community advocacy can achieve.

The ethnic communities that inhabit the Atrato River denounced through judicial mechanisms the humanitarian crisis that had been generated by the environmental impacts on the river and its forests, impacts that had accumulated for decades due to the lack of state control and the exponential growth of illegal economies such as mining and logging. The situation is not easy, as these economies are linked to illegal armed groups and criminal networks that even cross certain entities of the Colombian state.

The response to these complaints was sentence T-622, which not only declared the river as a subject of rights, but also delegated to the communities the task of being the voice of the river and representing it before government entities. Thus was born the Collegiate Body of Guardians of the Atrato, a figure of collective and community representation of the river, whose task is to ensure that government interventions result in the guarantee of community rights and those of the river, which are closely related.

The importance of this figure of representation is not minor, especially in a country where exclusions and impositions from the central government have been historical, and it is perhaps one of the most important results of the sentence. As the Socio-legal Center for Territorial Defense SIEMBRA, we have had the privilege of accompanying the guardians in their dialogues with the government and in the denunciations for all the affectations to the river that still occur.

It has been five years now working hand in hand with the guardians and the process has not been easy. On the one hand, containing criminal economies requires the implementation of government powers for which there is not always the will to activate, in addition to the security risks involved in trying to stop the sources of financing for armed groups. On the other hand, efforts to rehabilitate damaged ecosystems and recover community production systems clash with the inertia of the state’s historical performance: lack of resources, corruption, institutional weakness, institutional prejudices and exclusions, law mechanisms that were not designed to conceive nature and communities as actors with a voice.

We have been lucky enough to have important allies, such as SCIAF and the University of Glasgow, that have managed to create a support network around the guardians and our work, filling the gaps of knowledge that are needed, helping us to advocate nationally and internationally, allowing us to do our work through various resources. But the most important thing about these networks is undoubtedly the feeling that they generate of being able to continue with the work, of not feeling alone in complicated situations and feeling that the work that is necessary is supported by multiple actors. Some may think this is a small thing in relation to the paradigm shift that the rights of nature are invoking, but in the minutiae of the day-to-day work that makes these rights effective it can be a huge component.

Much can be theorised about the legal content of the rights of natural entities, about the way in which they confront a history of law that has not conceived nature as a subject, about the judicial mechanisms that these new subjects are calling to generate, but the reality behind the rights in the Atrato is that the struggle takes place in the minutiae of the details and in the need for communities to have sufficient capacity of incidence to bend the action of the State.

There are, however, reasons for hope. Advocacy with the government, and the openness of some entities to sit down face to face with the guardians, has generated important public policy commitments for Atrato that we hope will have the focus that we have demanded. The challenge is to ensure that these commitments are made in the best way possible, and for that it is necessary to continue to surround the guardians and further strengthen the support networks that have allowed this process, after several years, to bear the fruits we expected. Without these bold bets and the leveraging of resources, in the midst of great tensions and power relations, the rights of nature will be nothing more than mere rhetorical tools. We believe that there is where the true struggle lies.