Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

More than a decade after the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, our commitment is to contribute to the design of a new paradigm centered on the Earth, recognizing Nature as a collective entity subject to rights, as the center of society's value system, and recognizing the intrinsic value of all the elements that make it up, through the creation of new constitutions and constitutional amendments, as well as secondary and regulatory laws, that help the true implementation of the Rights of Nature in Mexico. These are our legal advances and what we still have to do.

Derecho y políticas ambientales en las Islas Baleares (Primer semestre 2022)

Derecho y políticas ambientales en las Islas Canarias (Primer semestre 2022)

Jurisprudencia ambiental de las Islas Canarias (Primer semestre 2022)

Derecho y políticas ambientales en Galicia (Primer Semestre 2022)

Derecho y políticas ambientales en Andalucía (Primer Semestre 2022)

Jurisprudencia penal ambiental (Primer semestre 2022)

Rights of Nature: the Path towards the Ecological Peace?

The major role of anthropogenic chemical pollution as a threat to human health and the environment was already highlighted at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Fifty years later, the efforts of the international community to reduce the generation of these products and their impact on human health and the environment appear to have been, so far, insufficient. Three international treaties, in particular, address the management of wastes and chemicals: the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, the 1998 Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for the Export of Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, and the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. The first part of this paper analyses these three instruments from the perspective of their goals and their scope of application, insofar as, being three autonomous agreements adopted at different times and with different specific purposes, they share the same overall objective of protecting human health and the environment. Secondly, it reviews various aspects that illustrate the difficulties encountered by the States Parties in fulfilling their commitment to prioritize the common objective of protecting the environment and public health in the face of the demands of multilateral trade. Thus, it notes the existence of some open doors that allow Parties to escape from the rigorous application of the letter and spirit of their provisions, which may ultimately reduce the operational capacity of these instruments. Thirdly, it examines how, in order to provide this sector with a more coherent and comprehensive approach, these three international agreements have come to constitute a regulatory cluster for the management of waste and chemicals, through the so-called synergy process which, although it has produced significant progress in the negotiations taking place within these three instruments, is not without its challenges.

The constant increase in the price of gold in the international market has stimulated, in Brazil, the resumption and growth of artisanal mercury mining and the formation of mines that generally operate illegally. The gold extraction process in this model operates with rudimentary technology and is highly dependent on mercury. The objective of this research was to analyze the current legislation and gather information about real events related to the problems generated by mercury in the illegal extraction of gold, in the Legal Amazon. The methodology used in this research was the method; as for the means, the research was bibliographical and as for the ends, qualitative. It is concluded that Brazilian legislation has gaps and the performance of responsible bodies and agents is insufficient to contain the advance of pollution and contamination by mercury in the Brazilian Amazon. It was also verified that the Brazilian legal mechanisms present a deep contradiction when establishing restrictive values ​​of the presence of mercury in the environment and, at the same time, allows the use of this metal in artisanal mining, generating an inefficient and inept preventive and inspection action of the State.