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Ocean Rights: A Citizen Tide in the Face of Diplomatic Silence

Marine Calmet
Reading time : 6 minutes

Ocean Rights Ignored, Citizens Respond Despite high hopes, the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice failed to recognize the intrinsic rights of the Ocean, omitting any mention of Ocean Rights, deep-sea mining, or industrial subsidies. Civil society, however, mobilized in force — with over 56,000 petitioners and a wave of legal and artistic initiatives demanding recognition of the Ocean as a living entity with rights. The Rights of Nature movement, already enshrined in countries like Ecuador and New Zealand, offers a transformative legal path: granting ecosystems legal personhood, defending their right to exist, and creating guardianship mechanisms. While diplomacy stalled, local and global actors launched practical tools and declarations to advance Ocean Rights — from coral reef protection guides to constitutional reform pledges. Recognizing these rights is not radical; it is rational, ethical, and necessary for planetary survival. The next global ocean summit must take the step that Nice failed to: embed Ocean Rights into international law — before it's too late.

Ocean Rights: A Citizen Tide in the Face of Diplomatic Silence

By Wild Legal – July 2025, following the UN Ocean Conference in Nice

“Our ocean, our future: united for urgent action.” Such was the promise of the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC) held in Nice. Yet, as the final declaration was sealed without a single reference to Ocean Rights, this promise rang hollow. While governments reaffirmed generic commitments to the “blue economy” and “good governance,” a surge of civic action showed that the tides are turning elsewhere — on the shores, in the courtrooms, and within the territories where new legal paradigms are being born.

This article is a call to action for negotiators and decision-makers. It recounts what was missed in Nice, what is already taking root in civil society, and why recognizing the intrinsic rights of the Ocean must become a cornerstone of global marine governance.

An Ocean Without a Voice: What UNOC Left Behind

Despite its title, the UNOC 2025 Declaration failed to recognize the Ocean as anything more than a resource. Not one word about deep-sea mining. No mention of ending harmful subsidies to industrial fisheries. No commitments to phase out offshore fossil fuel exploitation. And crucially — no acknowledgment of the Ocean’s intrinsic rights.

This absence is particularly troubling given the progress made elsewhere. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), adopted in 2022, explicitly refers to the Rights of Nature as a legitimate lever for transformative change. It calls for the recognition of “multiple values of biodiversity — intrinsic, relational, cultural — beyond purely economic.” This recognition is absent from the Nice Declaration, despite the fact that several member states (including Ecuador, Bolivia, and many others) have taken steps to enshrine Nature’s rights into their legal systems.

Two concrete proposals were submitted to UNOC negotiators by Wild Legal, Ocean Vision Legal, Earth Law Center and the Global Alliance for the rights of Nature — calling for the inclusion of Ocean Rights and transformative approaches grounded in the KMGBF. They were never discussed. Not even acknowledged. The final two plenaries were canceled, and the pre-written text remained unchanged from its May 2025 draft.

A growing number of stakeholders, including the delegation from Panama, denounced the disconnect between the negotiation zone (“Blue Zone”) and the citizen space (“Green Zone”). Calls were made for the next UNOC host country to ensure more transparent and participatory diplomacy.

A Citizen Wave Rises from Below

While diplomats hesitated, civil society mobilized. More than 56,000 people signed a petition demanding that the rights and intrinsic value of the Ocean be explicitly recognized in the UNOC declaration. While the demand was ignored in the official text, the resonance is growing.

More than a dozen initiatives — artistic, legal, scientific, and political — came together in Nice to defend the rights of the Ocean.

Each day, events and announcements brought this momentum to life: from the presentation of the book Justice for the Starfish, Towards the recognition of Ocean Rights (Justice pour l’étoile de mer, Vers la reconnaissance des droits de l’Océan, Marine Calmet and Francois Sarano, Ed. Actes Sud, 2025 ) alongside other committed authors, to the Great Blue March; from the mock trial for shark rights to the campaign ‘I am a person too’ in defense of Pacific whales — the fight for Ocean Rights infused citizen-led, artistic, and legal initiatives throughout the week.

The legal propositions behind Ocean Rights

Why speak of “rights” for the Ocean? Because our existing legal frameworks treat the Ocean as property, as territory to be managed, fished, drilled, or conserved — but never respected as a living entity with its own inherent worth.

First theorized in the early 1970s, the Rights of Nature movement gained international momentum in the 2000s. Ecuador was a pioneer, enshrining Nature’s Rights in its Constitution in 2008. Since then, this legal innovation has expanded from the United States to New Zealand, from India to Uganda, and now to Europe, including Spain, Ireland, and France.

The Rights of Nature are based on the principle that all of Nature has inherent and fundamental rights, possesses intrinsic value, and should no longer be considered an object or property, but rather a subject with its own rights.

This framework also acknowledges that humans are part of Nature and, therefore, human rights and Nature’s rights are inseparable, as the former depend on the preservation of the latter.

Around the world, rivers, mountains, and forests have been recognized as legal entities with rights. Recognizing the rights of the Ocean, both as a living community and as a habitat for countless interdependent entities, would strengthen our legal framework to preserve and restore ocean health for future generations. It would also promote a deep rethinking of national and international governance, ensuring that the ecological needs and interests of the Ocean are considered for peaceful and sustainable coexistence.

Recognizing the Ocean’s rights in an international treaty is not merely symbolic. It has political consequences :

  1. Advance Ocean Rights worldwide by replicating victories already achieved by leading countries such as Ecuador, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Spain, ensuring the creation of safe zones where Ocean rights take precedence over harmful industrial activities and exploitation.
  2. Defend the right of every marine ecosystem and creature to exist, ensuring that human activities at sea respect the Ocean’s vital cycles, functions, and processes.
  3. Give marine ecosystems and species a formal voice in decision-making through legal guardianship bodies and other mechanisms, ensuring their interests are directly represented and protected.
  4. Take legal action on behalf of the Ocean to halt destructive projects and protect its right to exist, thrive, regenerate, and evolve.
  5. Strengthen the power of Indigenous Peoples, as well as local communities, to defend their rights and those of the interconnected marine environments they depend on and protect as stewards.

Policy Recommendations: From Rhetoric to Implementation

If the UNOC truly aims to “accelerate action,” it must go beyond technical cooperation and financing instruments. It must recognize that law is not a neutral tool, but a structuring force that either perpetuates degradation or enables change.

We propose the following additions to future UNOC declarations and strategies :

  1. Valorising Ocean Rights and encouraging Member States to adopt and implement legal and governance models that recognize and uphold the intrinsic value and rights of the Ocean (‘Ocean Rights’) to protect and restore marine environments for planetary health.
  2. Integrate transformative approaches under SDG14 to align our use of the ocean with its ecological thresholds. It involves exploring Mother Earth-centric and non-market-based approaches, in line with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Such measures are aligned with existing frameworks:

In short: there is no legal incompatibility with existing treaties. There is only a political choice to be made.

The Future is Territorial: Rights Grow from the Ground (and Sea) Up

What the UNOC failed to adopt diplomatically is already sprouting locally.

Municipalities, Indigenous councils, legal clinics, and progressive judges are beginning to experiment with ecocentrical legal systems.

Fortunately, civil society within the Rights of Nature movement was not left behind. Several concrete tools were released during the summit:

During UNOC, some States expressed their willingness to move forward on the issue, notably Mauritius, whose Prime Minister announced in plenary that the country is engaging in a constitutional reform process to enshrine the Rights of Nature at the core of its legal system.

Other institutional pathways may open in the coming months, notably with the presentation of the motion ‘Making the Rights of Nature operational through their implementation in territories’ at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi.

The transformation is underway. It does not wait for consensus. It is rooted in coastal resistance, scientific integrity, and the moral intuition that a sea without rights is a sea without a future.

Conclusion: A New Pact for the Ocean

The next UNOC summit must make the leap that Nice refused to take.

Recognizing the rights of the Ocean is not radical. It is rational. It is aligned with the precautionary principle, with intergenerational equity, with the growing consensus on ethical environmental governance. It is also, ultimately, our best chance to survive and thrive alongside the marine lifeforms that have shaped our shared evolutionary history.

The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) affirmed in his 1609 treatise Mare Liberum that the sea, by its very nature, belongs entirely to all. In doing so, he laid the foundations of modern maritime law. The sea, unlike rivers, was to be considered a free and common space — for there was no fear that it could be depleted, overfished, or exhausted by the presence of too many fishermen.

Nearly five centuries later, scientific studies paint a very different picture of the ocean — profoundly altered by our extractivist activities.
The countless creatures that inhabit the Ocean are being decimated. And today, we recognize that each of them is unique — and therefore irreplaceable.

We now know that we are connected to all other living beings through 3.8 billion years of coevolution, and that our survival depends on their well-being.
Our knowledge has evolved, yet our laws — rooted in past ignorance — continue to drive us blindly toward self-destruction.

It is time to invent a legal system that meets the challenges of our era, so that all beings may be born and live, free and equal in rights — on land and at sea.

Let’s not miss the next tide.

Wild Legal is a French-based legal initiative promoting the recognition of the Rights of Nature.

Contact: contact@wildlegal.eu

 

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