A recent Grist report follows the growing effort to bring Rights of Nature into spaces where environmental harm is judged not only as a human injury, but as a violation of nature’s own inherent rights. In many Western legal systems, pollution is typically framed as wrong because it harms people who rely on an ecosystem. Rights of Nature flips that premise: a river, forest, or watershed has value – and rights – regardless of its usefulness to humans.
What happened in Toronto
Grist centers on the Sixth International Rights of Nature Tribunal, held in Toronto, where Indigenous and environmental advocates presented cases accusing Canadian mining companies of violating the rights of nature and Indigenous peoples. A panel of nine judges ultimately concluded that the companies had violated “collective rights, Indigenous rights, and rights of nature,” and described mining’s impacts as “ongoing ecocide.”
It’s important context that this tribunal is not a state court; it’s a forum designed to show what Rights of Nature–based jurisprudence could look like, especially given how often international law and national legal systems fail to recognize nature as a rights-bearing subject.
Why mining, and why Canadian companies
The tribunal chose mining because extraction can devastate ecosystems and communities, even as the global energy transition increases demand for minerals like lithium and copper used in EV batteries, solar panels, and other technologies.
Canadian companies were highlighted because of Canada’s outsized role in the global mining sector. Grist cites a MiningWatch Canada report noting more than 1,300 mining and exploration companies based in Canada, with hundreds operating overseas, and that about half of the world’s public mining companies are listed on Canadian exchanges.
What the tribunal is pushing for next
According to Grist, tribunal judges and speakers called for steps that would raise accountability for extractive industries – such as advancing international human rights standards for business conduct – and plan to present the tribunal’s findings later in 2025 at COP30 in Brazil, aiming to pressure governments to create stronger protections for nature and Indigenous rights.
A bigger global pattern: Rights of Nature is already reshaping law
Grist places the Toronto tribunal in a wider global arc:
- Ecuador’s 2008 constitution is highlighted as a landmark example of formal legal recognition of nature’s rights.
- The story points to Aotearoa/New Zealand, where legal personhood and related frameworks reflect Indigenous worldviews that treat mountains, rivers, and forests as living relatives (including the recent recognition of Taranaki Maunga).
- Indigenous attorneys interviewed in the piece argue that tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and tribal courts can be powerful pathways for enforcing the rights of nonhuman relatives—illustrated by legal strategies like naming manoomin (wild rice) as a plaintiff to defend its rights to clean water and habitat.
Why this matters for the Rights of Nature movement
The core takeaway is that Rights of Nature efforts are increasingly focused on enforceability: building evidence, developing legal theories, and creating venues – formal or informal – where harms to ecosystems are treated as direct rights violations, not merely side effects of human-centered injury. Grist also captures a recurring tension for climate advocates: the world needs materials for a clean-energy transition, but communities are demanding that the transition not be built on sacrifice zones, especially on Indigenous lands and in biodiversity-rich regions.
For organizations working to secure legal standing for ecosystems, the Toronto tribunal underscores a practical lesson: rights language travels – from Indigenous worldview to advocacy forum to constitutional text to courtroom strategies – and each step helps normalize the idea that nature can (and should) be represented as a rights-bearing party when extractive projects threaten its ability to exist, flourish, and regenerate.
Read the article In Canada, Indigenous advocates argue that mining companies violate the rights of nature, by Taylar Dawn Stagner & Joseph Winters, Grist, March 10, 2025.
