When six conflicts reveal a complex system

The International Rights of Nature Tribunal is neither a state court nor an international court established by treaty. Its Statute presents it as an international institution emerging from civil society, with participation from different continents and a mandate connected to the peoples represented through the People’s Convention and to the ambition of giving voice to Nature itself.

The Tribunal was formed in Ecuador in 2014. Ecuador was the first country to recognize Rights of Nature constitutionally. The Tribunal’s normative reference points include Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth adopted in Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, in 2010.

The Tiquipaya Declaration was adopted at the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. The conference also advanced the idea of an international tribunal capable of making visible and judging violations of the rights of Mother Earth, in connection with broader debates on climate justice and ecological debt.

The Tribunal accordingly understands its task as investigating alleged violations and advancing Earth Jurisprudence through judgments, decisions and opinions.

This is precisely why Puyo is legally interesting: legal development does not necessarily crystallize only when a legislature adopts a statute or a state court issues a binding judgment. From the Tribunal’s internal perspective, its strength lies in its independence, in the intellectual and moral authority of its judges, and in its ambition to open jurisprudential paths despite lacking binding state power. There is also an ethical dimension: resisting what, from this perspective, can be described as the “crime of silence” in the face of serious harms to humanity and nature.

In Ecuador, the Kichwa, Sápara, Andwa, Achuar, Shiwiar, Waorani and Shuar nationalities argued that new oil rounds projected over roughly three million hectares threaten ancestral territories of exceptional biological and cultural diversity. They recalled severe historical impacts of oil extraction in the north of the region, rejected the presentation of information or socialization meetings as consultation, and reported pressure, benefit offers, information deficits and risks of militarization and criminalization. They reaffirmed collective decisions opposing further oil expansion and called for transparency and territorial protection.

Ecuador has constitutionally recognized Rights of Nature since 2008. Article 71 protects nature’s existence and the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structures, functions and evolutionary processes; Article 72 establishes a right to restoration; Article 73 contains precautionary and restrictive duties. Article 57(7) concerns prior, free and informed consultation with Indigenous peoples, while Article 398 concerns environmental consultation. The issue is therefore not only making those norms effective. From the perspective defended in Puyo, Rights of Nature carry a universal vocation and should be understood as complementary to Human Rights, including the rights of those who defend Mother Earth.

In Colombia, the U’wa people stated that oil is the blood of Mother Earth and that its extraction affects an indivisible territorial, cultural and spiritual order. The hearing recalled the judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the need for full compliance. On 4 July 2024, the Court issued a binding judgment in Pueblo Indígena U’wa y sus miembros v. Colombia, finding, among other things, violations of collective property, participation, environmental and cultural rights. The case is now under compliance supervision. In this instance, therefore, the Puyo Tribunal does not simply create a new norm; it reinforces visibility and institutional pressure around law that has already been judicially recognized.

Block 64 in Peru reveals another dimension. The Achuar, Wampís and Chapra criticized the overlap of the block with their territories without consultation or consent and warned of renewed activation. They connected the project to the Norperuano pipeline, spills, environmental liabilities and the Talara refinery. Testimony described impacts on rivers, fishing, navigation, food security and community life. PETROPERÚ has held 100% of the contractual interest and operated the block since 2021 while seeking a strategic operating partner; PERUPETRO remains responsible for contractual administration. Current documentation shows that consultation and participation remain central and contested procedural issues. In Puyo, Block 64 was therefore viewed not as an isolated extraction project but within wider ecological, infrastructural and Indigenous relations.

In Venezuela, submissions concerning the Paraguaná Peninsula described decades of pollution associated with the refinery complex, spills, emissions, waste, impacts on fishing and degradation of coastal and marine ecosystems. Extensive documentation was presented concerning shortcomings in public information, monitoring, investigation and remediation, as well as difficulties in demanding accountability. The territory was described as a “sacrifice zone” created by accumulated damage and institutional abandonment.

In Bolivia, communities from Tariquía argued that oil exploration threatens the protected area, its forests and headwaters supplying water to the population. They described changes to the management plan, attempts to use signatures as apparent community support, corporate incursions, police presence and criminal proceedings against defenders. They maintained that consultation had not been carried out with those who live in and care for the reserve, and that separate assessments of wells and projects prevent cumulative impacts from becoming visible.

In Brazil, Indigenous representatives, fishers, lawyers and specialists described the marine-Amazon coast and the Foz do Amazonas as a living system encompassing mangroves, forests, waters, Amazon corals, fish, shellfish, crabs and territories on which entire communities depend. They argued that analysing a single well or block can conceal a much larger expansion across several basins and multiple blocks, with ecological connections and risks extending through the Atlantic toward the Caribbean. For those appearing before the Tribunal, the death of each fish represents the loss of part of the community’s own body.

For all their differences, the six cases share one aim in the Puyo hearing: safeguarding life in those territories — and beyond them.

Law and administration necessarily work through competences, project boundaries, concessions, environmental assessments and individual permits. Fragmentation is not in itself a defect. Environmental impact assessment, cumulative-effects analysis and strategic environmental assessment can also serve integrative functions. The decisive question is whether those tools actually capture the relevant functional sphere of effects — and whether existing rules are effectively applied.

Ecological systems, however, do not follow national borders or oil-block boundaries. From the perspective of the web of life, such lines cannot separate water, species, pollutants, transport and infrastructure effects or cultural relations. Landscape — Nature understood as living reality — extends well beyond a formal project perimeter. For Indigenous peoples, moreover, territory is not merely a cartographic surface but an integral space of life, culture, community and relationships.

This relationality can be connected to Alexander von Humboldt’s perception of interconnected natural systems, including the connection between the Orinoco and Amazon basins. It also finds expression in Indigenous life plans such as Kawsak Sacha, the living forest of the Kichwa people of Sarayaku. The functional sphere of effects thus acquires not only a scientific but also a relational, cultural and spiritual dimension.

Brazil illustrates this tension particularly clearly. The ANP records the exploratory well 1-BRSA-1405-APS in block FZA-M-59 as drilling since 20 October 2025; in June 2026 a further 36 blocks in the region were added to a study portfolio for possible future concessions. Each stage has its own legal status. But the systemic question is different: can a sequence of separately assessed decisions ultimately generate a development or management space whose aggregate effects fail to capture the integrity of the territory?

Tariquía, Paraguaná and the Ecuadorian oil frontier pose the same issue in different forms. The six cases reveal significant limits of existing legal and administrative structures when effects cross state, protected-area or project boundaries or when available integrative tools are not effectively applied.

The oral ruling also grouped a set of recurring issues: administrative fragmentation of indivisible ecosystems; absent or insufficient consultation, consent and participation; inaccessible information; lack of integral, cumulative and independent assessment; pollution and risks of irreversible harm; impacts on water, fisheries, food, health and ecological functions; and intimidation or criminalization of those defending territories.

The hearing likewise showed that Indigenous and community knowledge cannot be treated as a merely secondary reference. People who inhabit, care for and know these territories bring expert knowledge of ecological cycles, environmental transformations and material, cultural and spiritual relations. In the perspective articulated in Puyo, those forms of knowledge should enter into dialogue with scientific evidence on terms of equal dignity.

For the Tribunal, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth provides an integral frame that includes, among other things, rights to life and existence, continuity of vital cycles, water and clean air, integral health, freedom from pollution and restoration. This perspective also reinforces demands for prevention and precaution in relation to activities capable of destroying ecosystems or altering ecological cycles.

Puyo shows that more conventional law does not automatically produce greater ecological and social effectiveness. Ecuador constitutionally recognizes Rights of Nature; Colombia is bound by an Inter-American Court judgment; Peru and Brazil have developed authorization and participation structures; Bolivia recognizes rights of Mother Earth. Yet conflicts and implementation deficits persist.

Between norm and effect lie competences, procedural design, available information, implementation, political priorities and institutional capacity to learn. Legal development therefore does not end with the adoption of a norm or with a judgment. Failure to implement can also weaken legal development. A striking example is Ecuador’s 2023 Yasuní-ITT referendum, in which voters chose to end oil extraction in the ITT area. The subsequent implementation process shows that democratic decision and actual effect can diverge.

Here one possible function of the Tribunal becomes visible: it gives space to voices that are not sufficiently heard institutionally; brings together affected people’s experiences, Indigenous knowledge, scientific findings and legal references; makes resistance processes visible and accompanies them; carries results into national and international institutions; and can thereby contribute to broader civic awareness. Within the approach articulated in Puyo, scientific and ancestral knowledge should both be taken seriously. The scale shifts from the individual project to an integrated relation of effects; from national conflict to the pan-Amazon system; and from the isolated norm to its actual institutional effectiveness.

The Tribunal does not thereby create new binding pan-Amazon law. But it can generate a space in which norms and arguments are prepared, interpreted, condensed and reintroduced into existing institutions. Puyo also demanded a wider scale: the Amazon is connected to the Andes, the Atlantic and Caribbean, other regions of the continent and ecological systems worldwide. From the Tribunal’s normative perspective, this supports a claim to the universality of Rights of Nature — not an assertion that such universality already constitutes positive law.

This is why Puyo is particularly interesting for a theory of systemic legal development. The six cases perform different functions: normative pre-development, condensation of existing norms, reinforcement of a judgment, diagnosis of normative collisions, or making cumulative damage visible. What they share is a demand for a change in the level of observation and for mechanisms capable of responding to complex systems — a kind of “Copernican turn” in the sense of a radical shift of perspective, drawing on the well-known metaphor associated with Immanuel Kant.

From a well to a watershed and sphere of effects.

From an oil block to a chain of infrastructure and decisions.

From the boundary of a protected area to the question of functional ecological reach.

From six national conflicts to the Amazon as a system interconnected at continental and global scale.

Once nature is conceived as a subject of rights, a long-debated question acquires practical urgency: where does that legal subject begin and end? At a river, a forest, a watershed, a coastal zone, a transnational ecosystem such as the Amazon — or, as different Indigenous knowledge systems propose, with Pacha Mama or Mother Earth as a wider whole?

This perspective can also be related philosophically to Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura and to the distinction between Natura naturans and Natura naturata: nature not merely as an object, but as both productive and produced reality.

The larger the ecological legal subject, the more demanding become its delimitation, representation, jurisdiction and conflict resolution. The boundary problem is not new; it has been discussed since Christopher Stone (1972) and in contemporary Rights-of-Nature literature. A distinctive contribution of systemic legal development may lie in connecting boundaries and scale coherently with the functional sphere of effects, representation, jurisdiction and institutional processing — as a possible framework for the systemic delimitation of ecological legal subjects.

Puyo’s relevance does not lie in attributing state legal power to a civil-society ethical tribunal that it does not possess. What is notable is the process: six conflicts are aggregated in a procedure with legal form; different forms of knowledge are brought into relation; existing norms, judgments and political demands are systemically condensed; and the results are intended to feed back into state and international institutions.

It cannot seriously be claimed today that this mechanically produces new positive law, new jurisprudence or changed administrative practice. Resonance must be observed — for example through judicial references, administrative practice or incorporation into legislative and regulatory materials. It may also become visible in the wider circulation of the Tribunal’s messages and in new processes of public deliberation. Only then can we determine whether this innovative space becomes legal development in a narrower and practically effective sense.

What is already visible is an organized space with legal form that prepares possible development. Perhaps legal development begins precisely there: long before a new norm appears in an official gazette.

From the Tribunal’s normative perspective, its decisions are also a call to civil society to work democratically toward biocentric and socially just societies and toward binding instruments that connect Human Rights and Rights of Nature more closely. This is a programmatic position, not merely a description of existing positive law.

At the center of human action, on this view, should stand the dignity of the lives of human and non-human beings — a foundation of the biocentric perspective articulated in Amazonian Indigenous cultures.

• International Rights of Nature Tribunal: Regional Hearing on a Fossil Fuel-Free Amazon at XII FOSPA, Puyo 2026.
• International Rights of Nature Tribunal: Statute, especially Arts. 1–2, and institutional self-description.
• Ecuador: Constitution of 2008, especially Arts. 57, 71–73 and 398.
• Inter-American Court of Human Rights: Pueblo Indígena U’wa y sus miembros v. Colombia, judgment of 4 July 2024, Series C No. 530; ongoing compliance supervision.
• PETROPERÚ / PERUPETRO: Block 64 contractual and operating status, participation and consultation materials.
• ANP Brazil: 2026 exploration reports and decisions concerning blocks in the Margem Equatorial / Foz do Amazonas.
• Ecuador’s National Electoral Council and Constitutional Court: 2023 Yasuní-ITT referendum and implementation framework.
• Alexander von Humboldt: observations on the natural connection between the Orinoco and Amazon basins, including the Casiquiare region.
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the second edition: the Copernican-turn metaphor.
• Baruch Spinoza, Ethics: Deus sive Natura and the distinction Natura naturans / Natura naturata.
• Christopher D. Stone (1972), Should Trees Have Standing?; Clark et al. (2018), Can You Hear the Rivers Sing?; Alberto Acosta & Enrique Viale (2024), La Naturaleza sí tiene derechos aunque algunos no lo crean.

This article also draws on the complete transcript of the third regional session of the Rights of Nature Tribunal in Puyo and on a critical individual review of the six cases. Alberto Acosta served as a member of the Tribunal in that session and contributed both material from the hearing and an institutional and normative perspective from within the process. The phrases «sujeto integral de derechos» and «zona de exclusión total de combustibles fósiles» are documented in the transcript of the oral decision. They are reproduced here as positions of the civil-society Tribunal, not as binding pan-Amazon law.

This article, including the accompanying AI-generated image, is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Suggested attribution:
Content responsibility: Hans Leo Bader and Alberto Acosta. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Image (where included): generated in cooperation with AI using ChatGPT Images (OpenAI) – License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0