Latest news with #AntarcticRights
Daily Maverick
17-06-2025
- Science
- Daily Maverick
From anti-apartheid to Antarctic rights — the radical legal vision of Cormac Cullinan
The South African lawyer believes the melting continent should be recognised as a legal person. The growing momentum behind the idea — and a major polar award — suggests the world may be ready to listen. When Cormac Cullinan strolled into the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London earlier this month, he thought he was there to answer a few questions for a panel of judges. Cullinan, a Cape Town-based lawyer and a figurehead of the international Antarctic Rights initiative, had been shortlisted for the 2025 Shackleton Medal for the Protection of the Polar Regions. He insists he had no reason to expect he would win the £10,000 prize and a hand-struck silver medal. Fellow nominees included polar luminaries — scientists, conservationists and contemporary explorers. Sir Ernest Shackleton's granddaughter, Alexandra, was a judge. 'I was surprised to be shortlisted,' says Cullinan, the environmental lawyer who helped suspend Shell's seismic surveys off South Africa's Wild Coast. Cullinan had let the organisers know he would be passing through London in early June, in case they wanted to meet him. The RGS's official line was that the final decision was yet to be made. When they asked him to meet the executive, he assumed it was just part of the shortlisting process. 'It was a really amazing building,' he says. 'On one corner is a statue of Shackleton, on the other David Livingstone. These great explorers had been members.' He sat at the end of a table, surrounded by the RGS top brass and a publicity team. 'I thought they were filming it because not all the judges were there.' What happened next blindsided the South African. 'I didn't think my beard was rugged enough' 'They said, 'Before you go, there's just one more thing.' They put a laptop in front of me,' Cullinan recalls. 'It was the Shackleton award video. When it came to the end, it said, 'And the 2025 winner is… ' And this picture of me came up.' The organisers had choreographed the moment to the last detail, complete with a photo shoot and Shackleton expedition-style jersey on hand — modelled after the one worn by the Irish explorer in a famous photograph. 'At least it made me look more … Shackletonian,' Cullinan smiles. 'Even if I didn't think my beard was rugged enough.' Cullinan, the legal pioneer behind the concept of earth jurisprudence, says the award is a collective recognition for the Antarctic Rights initiative. They had just met in Devon, followed by academic discussions in Oxford. 'It was extraordinary synchronicity,' Cullinan says. Cullinan hopes the recognition from the Shackleton Medal will open doors. 'This thing will give us huge leverage,' he says. An inclusive voice for the imperilled region At the core of the initiative is the radical idea that the frozen – but melting — Antarctic continent and surrounding ocean should be recognised as a legal person with its own voice in global governance. The initiative's draft declaration supports human involvement in the region, such as science and activities like controlled tourism and fishing. Even so, Cullinan argues that Antarctica's representative voice 'would be a pure kind of voice for nature and Antarctica'. This probably means refining the Antarctic Treaty System in its present form, he argues, which he describes as secretive and often gridlocked by geopolitics. 'I had to unlearn what my culture had taught me' Cullinan's path to the Shackleton Medal began on Durban's segregated beaches during the final decade of apartheid. 'I cut my teeth as an anti-apartheid activist,' Cullinan says. A 1980 student exchange to New Zealand exposed him to an unflinching external view of his home country. As a founding chair of the Durban Democratic Association, an affiliate of the non-racial United Democratic Front (UDF), Cullinan remembers organising 'street marches to go on to segregated beaches and many different things … 'I had been born into the oppressor class. When the scales fell from my eyes, I had to unlearn a lot of what I had absorbed unconsciously from apartheid society. I ended up leaving the country to avoid conscription, because I wasn't going to fight for that army.' Thomas Berry, the American eco-theologian, gave Cullinan the concept to move from political activism into jurisprudence. That idea of unlearning dominance would become the philosophical heart of what Cullinan later called earth jurisprudence: a radical reimagining of the law and seeing it as intrinsic to the ecological order. 'Berry taught me that the philosophy of law only deals with humans and corporations. But legal philosophy needs to deal with all our relationships — including with beings other than humans,' Cullinan says. A global movement for Antarctica — 'modelled' on the UDF This led to his 2002 book Wild Law, which set out the founding principles of earth jurisprudence. From this grew a movement. In 2010, Cullinan was asked by Bolivian campaigners to lead the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Bolivia's legislative assembly passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth that year — around the same time the lawyer helped co-found the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. 'To my mind it was modelled quite closely on the UDF in South Africa,' Cullinan says. 'An alliance of organisations of many kinds, united around a few core principles.' That idea — with nature as a legal subject and ecocide as the crime — neared a possible new frontier when Cullinan was approached by German MEP Carola Rackete in 2021. Rackete asked him: Could rights of nature be applied to Antarctica itself? 'I thought, 'Well, if Antarctica is going to have rights, it has to be a person in the eyes of the law,'' he remarks. 'I realised you're talking for the first time about an ecological entity being a person under international law.' 'Open' for input Cullinan and a working group of academics, lawyers and legal campaigners have set out to draft the Antarctica Rights Declaration, now open for feedback. It proposes rights for the region which would, in theory, enable the Antarctic to hold states or corporations accountable for actions that violate those rights. To represent Antarctica's interests in an international court, Cullinan suggests a kind of parliament may emerge — a representative body that appoints delegates to climate summits and biodiversity talks. Representation, he boldly adds, may even include participation in Antarctic Treaty consultative meetings, the annual governance gathering which this year opens in Milan on June 23. 'What's good for Antarctica,' presses the Shackleton Medal recipient, 'is good for humanity.' DM
Daily Maverick
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
In the Court of the Cold — Antarctica has rights, and we're just learning to see them
The curious and, for some, curiously threatening initiative known as the Rights of Antarctica, and, more broadly, the emerging notion of Antarctic Rights has been cast, with increasing anxiety, as a security threat or a direct challenge to the existing power structures and frameworks that currently control how Antarctica is governed. Yet, to read Rights of Antarctica as simply a threat is already to misread it. Or rather, it is to mistake a modest proposal for a revolution, or to confuse enlarging the moral circle with a call to overturn the table. Properly understood and stripped of atmosphere, Rights of Antarctica is a legal movement concerned with giving Antarctica – under an expanded definition – a jural life. As I have noted in this column before, this is not an altogether unprecedented leap. What form this jural life might ultimately take remains undefined. But the draft Antarctic Declaration gestures toward an Antarctica capable of exercising powers like those of a state under international law, a notion some have described as 'environmental statehood'. This should not be confused with an 'environmental state' in the more conventional sense of a nation-state that has developed advanced institutions for environmental governance. There are several theories about how this could take shape. One proposal is that Rights of Antarctica be housed within the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) itself. On the surface, this seems like a tidy solution: integrate Rights of Antarctica as another instrument in the ATS corpus, tack it on like the Madrid Protocol – the agreement that protects Antarctica's environment by banning mining and requiring all activities to minimise harm to its ecosystems – and move forward. But this line of reasoning depends on assumptions that are, at best, optimistic and, at worst, structurally blind. The core difficulty is that Antarctica is protected today not because it is Antarctica, but because harming it would eventually harm us. The current legal regime is anthropocentric not just in its design, but in its logic (and ethics). In other words, the legal system usually only pays attention to nature when something in it starts to affect humans. So, concern flows from us down to the rest of the planet, not the other way around. Rights of Antarctica would invert that presumption. It would begin with the idea that Antarctica is the rights holder, not only the setting on which rights-holding humans negotiate their entitlements. That, understandably, unsettles a few chairs at the table. That said, the core idea behind Rights of Antarctica is deceptively narrow – it's about giving Antarctica a say when big decisions are made. For example, if someone wants to send a fishing boat (Josephine Soap's trawler) into Antarctic waters, we should stop and ask, 'Is this good or bad for Antarctica?' Sometimes the boat might still be allowed to go, but other times we might say no, because Antarctica's well-being matters too. In other cases, Antarctica's right to be left 'cold' may carry greater weight. It's not about saying the old rules are bad (even if that may be the case), it is about making sure those rules are doing what they were supposed to: protecting Antarctica. Rights of Antarctica arises from this felt gap – the legal system's inability to see non-human interest unless it serves human ones. Increasingly, however, that framing no longer fits the facts. A growing number of people are starting to see that Antarctica's needs cannot always be protected by general political promises or polite international meetings. For example, it is one thing to agree in theory that Antarctica should be preserved. It is another to actually stop a country from expanding fishing zones or building new research bases in fragile ecosystems. That is why I suggest we are not dealing with just one system of Antarctic governance, but two. The first governance system consists of Rights of Antarctica in its aspirational form, as well as the provisions of certain ATS legal instruments that already purport to speak on behalf of non-human interests – for example, 'intrinsic' values as contemplated in the Madrid Protocol. The second system governs humans – their conduct, diplomatic consultation and territorial claims. The challenge with the first governance system is that it depends on accuracy. Antarctica is a natural system, so giving it a voice it starts with science. In this setup, regulation comes after understanding. However, the better we grasp the natural laws that shape Antarctica – like its climate, ocean currents and ecosystems – the smarter and more effective the rules for human activity around it can be. I have elsewhere suggested that governing Antarctica's natural system – the first governance system – is best thought of as a famous Millennium Prize Problem. I'm talking about a hugely complex scientific challenge, because a natural system like Antarctica depends on grappling with fluid dynamics. Fluid dynamics are – stay with me on this one – governed by partial differential equations called the Navier-Stokes equations, which even mathematicians still struggle to fully solve. The second governance system focuses on human society and how we interact with Antarctica. It deals with things like territorial claims, research stations and legal decision-making processes among countries. This system is rightly human-centred, because it actually governs the people who govern and use Antarctica, not the continent itself. Ideally, the second, human governance system exists to help us implement the scientific and indigenous insights from the first, non-human one more effectively and fairly. This distinction shows that Antarctic governance is divided. On one hand, it works to legitimise and control human activities in Antarctica. On the other, Antarctic governance tries to protect the very environment those activities endanger. The Rights of Antarctica movement simply brings this hidden contradiction into the open. It is on this basis that the human (and non-human governance systems) should be thought of as a kind of Ship of Theseus. This is the ancient thought experiment that asks: If you replace a ship's planks one by one, at what point does it stop being the original ship? In our case, the laws and institutions that govern Antarctica are slowly being revised, piece by piece, to meet new realities. Eventually, they may look nothing like the structures that first set sail in 1959. But the key point – whether or not we still call it the same system – is that Antarctica still needs something strong, seaworthy and fit for the climate changes and challenges ahead. This work demands a moral education, a period of humility, empathy and intellectual honesty. In June, the Antarctic Rights Working Group met in Devon in southwest England to continue this line of enquiry – just as the Royal Geographical Society awarded South African founding member and lawyer Cormac Cullinan with the prestigious Shackleton Medal for the Protection of the Polar Regions. We spoke about legitimacy of the movement, how Rights of Antarctica relates to the two governance systems, the position of indigenous communities in Antarctic governance and the formal launch of the alliance. To speak of Antarctic Rights is not about protecting Antarctica with new words but about asking what kind of law can stand in right relationship with Antarctica. If justice is to mean anything in the Anthropocene, it must be reoriented beyond the human. DM
