Blue Ambassador Erin O’Donnell is coming to Europe.
In mid-June, Blue Community Ambassador Erin O’Donnell, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne Law School in Australia and the author of Legal Rights for Rivers: Competition, Collaboration and Water Governance, will be in Europe, delivering lectures in Zurich, Berlin and Vienna.
Title: Upholding the rights of river persons: enforcement or relational repair?
Abstract: River rights is now a transnational movement, with over 100 examples of rivers around the world gaining the legal status of persons, subjects, or living entities. The question of whether rivers should have rights is beginning to give way to the question of what happens when they do. In this lecture, I examine the question of how to enforce these new legal rights in three ways. First, we need to be clear what rights rivers actually have, which do not always include the right to go to court, or rights to water flowing between their banks. Second, there are many mechanisms for enforcement, ranging from the highly adversarial lawsuit through to broader accountability processes. Third, we need to understand the limits of enforcement, which may not restore river health, or repair relations between people and rivers. When rivers gain new legal rights, we can continue to rely on existing legal enforcement processes, but this misses a real opportunity for creative law and policy reform that transforms our relationship with rivers.
Agenda
15 June: Lucerne, Switzerland
Visit to Lucerne and meeting with Reuss Initiative (local river rights campaign)
16 June: Dübendorf, Switzerland
- Visit at Eawag, Aquatic Research Institute
- Meeting with AGUASAN, Community of Practice
AGUASAN is a longstanding interdisciplinary Swiss community of practice (CoP) that brings together a broad range of specialists to promote wider and deeper understanding of key issues in water and sanitation in international cooperation.
17 June: Zurich, Switzerland
- Visit to the Department of Geography – Hydrology & Climate H2K of the Blue University of Zurich. Meeting with Prof Jan Seibert and his team.
- Meeting with the Blue Community Zurich
- 6 pm: public event / lecture (language: English) hosted by the Zurich Knowledge Center for Sustainable Development (ZKSD) at Kulturpark Zurich (Pfingstweidstr. 16, tram 8 or 51 or Bus 33, 46 or 72 to Schiffbau or tram 51 to Technopark or 500m walking from train station Zurich Hardbrücke. See map)
18 June: Berlin, Germany
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10:00 am: Visit, lecture and conversation at the Berlin Metropolitan School, hosted by World Peace Service (WFD) – https://wfd.de
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3:00 pm: Lecture and panel discussion: Upholding the rights of river persons: enforcement or relational repair? Location: aquarium Berlin (Skalitzer Straße 6 am Kottbusser Tor) hosted by Living Rivers Foundation – https://www.living-rivers.eu/
- 7:00 pm: movie screening “We Are River People! Aren’t We?” at Patagonia followed by a discussion (details and registration here)
19 June: Berlin, Germany
- 10:00 am: Visit and tour of the flood‑management site at Potsdamer Platz, hosted by Erwin Nolde – https://innovative-wasserkonzepte.de
- Afternoon: Lecture at Königin-Luise-Stiftung in Dahlem and/or Meeting with activists from Blue Community Berlin
see full Berlin programme here
22/23 June: conference in Vienna, Austria (not open to public)
See also the Blue Talk with Erin O’Donnell here:
Background information
European citizens’ initiative “Rights for Nature” is scheduled to start in autumn.
A coalition of citizens from all over Europe launched the “Rights for Nature” initiative. The aim is to get the European Union to treat ecosystems as legal entities and not just as pure resources. Such approaches already exist in other countries: the Mar Menor Lagoon in Spain and the Whanganui River in New Zealand have already received their own rights, allowing people to take legal action on behalf of nature. It is precisely this change that the initiative wants to promote by collecting over one million signatures from autumn 2026, which would require the EU Commission to deal with the proposal.
