Literature Review

How do you advocate over ownership over something that can’t be owned? This is the dilemma of sacred sites. When sacred land, like that of Avi Kwa Ame (Spirit Mountain), is under threat of defacement through private land bids, what is a sufficient way to advocate for something that can feel so intangibly powerful and culturally, spiritually important?

The recent proposal by an International Expert Panel to include the crime of ecocide in the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute has raised expectations for preventing and remedying severe environmental harm through international prosecution in the Anthropocene. As alluring as this image is, however, we argue that ecocide prosecutions may be the most difficult, perhaps even impossible, in precisely the cases that the ICC would be most concerned with, namely, the gravest global incidents of environmental damage, especially those associated with planetary climate change. Here, we explore a series of questions about the Panel’s formulation of ecocide that resonate with longer debates around criminalizing environmental harm but take on new dimensions amidst global climatic disruption and after twenty years of ICC trials. Ecocide must thus contend with the hard lessons learned concerning the ICC’s limitations in realizing justice in a fraught international political context and also fundamental challenges to knowledge arising from the dynamic ecology and uncertainty of the Anthropocene. The proposed amendment, if adopted, risks ineffective prosecutions or perverse outcomes for justice and even the environment itself. This risk, however, may characterize not just the Panel’s proposal but perhaps any effort to prosecute ecocide internationally in the Anthropocene.

Abstract: Crimes against the environment affect fundamental values and collective interests shared by the international community as a whole. The ‘global’ nature of the protected interests and the erga omnes character of many international environmental obligations are the main arguments in favour of the international criminalisation of certain environmental harms. This paper offers a survey of the development of international law with regard to the legal definition and consequences of environmental crimes from the perspective of both the law of state responsibility and international criminal law, up to the latest definition of ecocide and the proposal for its inclusion in the Rome Statute as formulated by the Panel of Independent Experts convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation. In so doing, the legal regime related to environmental crimes is also considered through the environmental ethics lens, so as to evidence the progressive evolution from an anthropocentric approach to the ecocentric view which characterises the new legal definition of the crime of ecocide.

The concept of property has been the focus of recent debate in environmental ethics. Proponents of private property rights argue that private owners are likely to preserve natural areas and endangered species because they alone have to bear the costs associated with environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.1 Others argue that property rights in natural resources are limited by obligations to do justice to the interests non-owners have in ‘common goods.’2 In what follows I will broaden the debate about property in environmental ethics by suggesting a very different way that private ownership could help protect natural areas and the nonhuman animals that inhabit them. As a check on human intervention in natural areas that is destructive of habitat, a nonhuman animal property rights regime (structured along the lines I suggest) can secure the maintenance of ecosystem stability and ensure the vital interests of nonhuman animals are respected. The key moral demands of environmentalism and animal rights can be met by extending the scope of property ownership beyond the human species to other sentient animals that have a vital interest in using natural goods

Nonhuman animals are things under the laws of all fifty states of the United States. Subject to relevant regulations or statute, nonhuman animals may therefore be purchased, sold, used, exploited, and killed as the owner wishes. In 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed its first groundbreaking common law habeas corpus cases in New York State on behalf of imprisoned chimpanzees and sought to persuade the courts to transform their status from legal things that lack the capacity for legal rights to legal persons capable of possessing their own legal rights. 2Link to the text of the note This Article broadly explores whether a state's political subdivisions may exercise home rule jurisdiction to enact ordinances or bylaws that grant a legal right to nonhuman animals. While this Article is not premised on the granting of a specific legal right to a specific species of nonhuman animal, as such a determination will be unique to the particular municipality, it discusses why an ordinance or bylaw that enacted a law granting the right to bodily liberty to appropriate nonhuman animals within its jurisdiction would be upheld if it were challenged. This articel explores the use of a constitutional home rule as a valid legal strategy to create greater legal protections for nonhuman animals. The home rule is a legal concept that allows municipalities to govern their local affiars pursuant to the police power as they see fit. Wise considers the states with constitutional home rules as suitable candidates for pursuing this strategy. He notes that in New Mexico, a local ordinance that requires the treatment of animals as more than mere chattel to have been upheld as a valid exercise of the home rule. See, HEART ordinance, requiring humans to treat animals in a manner that reflects basic humanitarian beliefs. If home rule powers can promote the policy that animals are not to be viewed as things, or to prevent unnecessary pain in animals because of moral concerns for an animal's own well-being, it is legally permissible for a municipality to grant nonhuman animals legal rights. The challenges to the home rule strategy, given its application to regulation of animal welfare, are whether the rule would be preempted by state law (hunting, commerce) or whether the rule would have extraterritorial effects. Wise concludes that these challenges, among other constitutional challenges such as dormant commerce clause, equal protection, or the takings clause, as well as any federal preemption on the basis of animal welfare or endangered species laws, would not be successful. He concludes that a municipal ordinance pursuant to the constitutional home rule granting nonhuman animals greater legal rights, such as a quasi-vested interest as sentient chattel in human treatment or freedom from cruelty would pass muster. The states are Alaska, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennesse, and Utah.

Briefly, at 543, Couto notices that Australia Capital Territory has amended its Animal Welfare law in 2019 to formally recognize animal sentience as the overall sense of how animal is coping both mentally and physically allowing for a more robust framework for protecting animals from cruelty and issuing citations to that end. Interestingly, a duty of care is imposed on humans as a result of this amendment, which is a novel approach to the framework that departs from the anthropocentric model.

In her article, Cohen proposes an interspecies right to breastfeed. She explores the state of American jurisprudence as affecting the breastfeeding relationship between mother and young as anthropocentric in the context of the dairy industry. She identifies several animal protection laws that protect the calf-young/lactation. For example, at the state level, individual legislatures may tailor their animal welfare or anti-cruelty law to directly protect the breastfeeding relationship. Additionally, Cohen briefly identifies private, self-regulation by farmers to promote, mother-bonded calf-breeding. She finally notes that the positive right to breastfeeding--as a relational right involving both the child's right to be breastfed and the mother's right to engage in it--is absent from our Constitutional law which construe the right to breastfeed mostly in circumstances where the undeniable right to do so was violated by state policy. In most contexts, the right to breastfeed is overguarded beyond that which the Constitution commands by protections through maternity leave. Finally, Cohen proposes an interspecies right to breastfeed. She notes that reforming the anthropocentric view of breastfeeding to an interspecies protection of pregnant or child-rearing humans and nonhuman animals to safeguard the immediate period following birth where breastfeeding takes place would benefit crucial stakeholders, specifically, the environment, presently unregarded by the current paradigm. She identifies an inverse relation: a robust right to breastfeed for human mothers would in turn decrease reliance on the need for dairy formula protects, which in turn would make room for greater animal welfare, insofar as the dairy formula industry is heavily reliant on weak protections for breastfeeding human mothers.

Class actions are commonly used to redress mass wrongs against humans—but what about mass wrongs against animals? This Article provides a comprehensive overview of the types of animal-related class actions that have been filed in the United States, predominantly in the field of consumer law, and explores how these actions can be used as a strategic tool to advance protections for animals within the confines of their legal status as property. This Article also highlights the challenges that have been faced by these animal-related class actions in obtaining class certification pursuant to Rule 23 and offers some practical strategies for overcoming them in the future. In doing so, the author hopes to provide a clear and concise guide for the animal protection movement to successfully utilize the class actions for the benefit of animals. Vickey explains how in our jurisprudence, the framework for redressing injury is completely anthropocentric. Animals do not have standing and are property before the law. The Nonhuman Rights Project by Steven Wise is laudabable in that it has made headway in bringing attention to the rights of highly intelligent and sentient animals held in captivity by bringing habeas corpus petitions on their behalf, but these have been unsuccessful. Standing, in the sense of the right to sue, is conferred on an animal's owner, a nonprofit that claims an aesthetic harm, or the People/State in context of animal cruelty law violation (penal). Vickey then explains the various challeneges that face those with standing to bring a case individually in the context of class actions -- finding that certification is often denied for a confluence of reasons that are unique to the property status of animals.

This article discusses critical comparisons between the human and nonhuman abolitionist movements in the United States. The modern nonhuman abolitionist movement is, in some ways, an extension of the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ongoing human Civil Rights movement. As such, there is considerable overlap between the two movements, specifically in the need to simultaneously address property status and oppressive ideology. Despite intentional appropriation of terminology and numerous similarities in mobilization efforts, there has been disappointingly little academic discussion on this relationship. There are significant contentions regarding mobilization and goal attainment in the human abolitionist movement that speak to modern collective action on behalf of other animals. This article will explore the human abolitionist movement and discuss possible applications of movement organization, tactical repertoires, and goal attainment to the current nonhuman animal rights movement. Specifically, the utility of violence and legislative activism in the antislavery movement are discussed as potentially problematic approaches to abolishing nonhuman animal exploitation. Alternatively, the nonhuman animal rights focus on consumer resistance and nonviolence represent an important divergence in abolitionist mobilization.

The previous chapters have argued that human rights can and should be extended to animals. This final part advocates the recognition of animal rights as new human rights. Accepting animal rights as the next generation of (non)human rights would constitute a seismic shift and likely lead to the formation of a new (post-)human rights paradigm. Based on the indivisibility and interdependence of human and animal rights, this chapter proposes One Rights as a novel, holistic human rights paradigm for the Anthropocene.

Animal rights is an idea whose time has come. This book looks at animal rights through the lens—and as a phenomenon—of new human rights. It revisits a question once famously asked by the philosopher Paola Cavalieri: are human rights human? In other words, can and should animals have some of the same fundamental rights that have traditionally been reserved for humans in the guise of ‘human rights’?

In April 2017, a mock tribunal issued an advisory opinion from the seat of the Internation Court of Justice in Hague declaring that the congolmerate Monsanto was, among other things, accountable for human rights violations, complicity in war crimes, and potentially the crime of Ecocide. On the question of Ecocide, the IMT found - based on scientific studies and empirical evidence - that it is possible Monsanto has been responsible for damage to whole ecosystems 95 or, at the very least, possibly presided over and was complicit in supplying toxins (specifically, Agent Orange) that significantly and durably altered ecosystem services [*233] that people relied upon for well-being and survival. 96 The Tribunal proffered the opinion that the time is ripe for a formal legal conceptualization of the crime of Ecocide and to integrate it into an amendment to the Rome Statute. These symbolic findings may have served as the impetus towards the proposedRome statute amendment.