Publicaties

This chapter analyses the leeway for the operationalisation of animal property rights within the European Union. After having outlined the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of human property, this chapter assesses the possible interplay between the concept of animal property rights and recent manifestations of rights of nature. Through a detailed analysis of the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU, this chapter claims that a ...

Ecological restoration has emerged as one of the leading paradigms in the context of environmental governance during the past decades. With the release of a Proposal for an EU restoration law in 2022, the European Commission underlined the pioneering role of the European Union in this regard. In this chapter, we analyse the precise alignment between ecological restoration and a rights-based approach to nature protection. Using the recently ...

This chapter discusses one of the ‘hard cases’ of nature’s rights: the case of invasive alien species. The question is how to balance the conservation of endangered species with the individual interests of invasive species. In this chapter, some of the recurring contradictions in the rights of nature framework are tackled through the lens of invasive species. Taking the case of the grey squirrel (sciurus carolimensis) as a starting point, the ...

The EU legal order has produced some of the most stringent protection schemes for the environment and human health of the world. However, as of today, the rights of ecosystems are not explicitly recognized in the EU Treaties, and neither do progressive pieces of legislation, such as the EU Habitats Directive and the Water Framework Directive, explicitly grant legal rights to nature. In light of the emergence of more rights-based approaches to ...

In 2022, the European Commission proposed an EU Nature Restoration Law (Proposal). This was a groundbreaking proposal and would be the first comprehensive piece of binding international legislation that holds legally binding targets and deadlines for landscape-wide restoration. Although the Proposal initially received very positive reactions from a variety of stakeholders, including scientists, organizations, and companies, certain lobby ...