News & Events

Todd Crider, Head of the Firm’s Latin America Practice, spoke on March 24, 2022 at the Permanent International Seminar sponsored by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Due Process of Law Foundation to facilitate a regional dialogue as to rights to water in Mexico and Latin America, especially in relation to indigenous peoples. Todd addressed the “Rights of Rivers and Rights of Nature.” His contribution to the permanent seminar was based on the report co-authored by the Cyrus Vance Center for International Justice on the “Rights of Rivers: a global survey of the rapidly developing Rights of Nature jurisprudence pertaining to rivers”. The Rights of Nature is an emerging area of law that departs from conceptions of nature as property or in relation to its utility to human beings, and instead sees nature as a separate and legally protected value, with standing (through organizations or people) and intrinsically deserving protection. This emerging area of law derives from multiple influences, and most directly from conceptions of nature common to indigenous peoples that place humanity as part of nature, such that many of the countries in which the Rights of Nature are most recognized are countries with large populations, and influences, of indigenous peoples, such as Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and New Zealand.

The Permanent International Seminar is an international space for dialogue and reflection on the human right to water and its effective validity in Mexico, taking into account current national and international standards, advances on the subject in comparative law and the interrelation of this right with other fundamental rights of indigenous communities such as self-determination or prior consultation.