LEGAL PERSONHOOD FOR RIVERS ACROSS BORDERS: THE TERRITORIAL TRAP IN THE RIGHTS OF NATURE MOVEMENT.

I. Introduction

In March 2017, two legal systems on opposite sides of the world did something no legal system had done before. They declared a river to be a legal person. New Zealand's Parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, and days later the Uttarakhand High Court, in Mohd. Salim v. State of Uttarakhand, extended a similar status to the Ganga and Yamuna. This idea has also travelled to Colombia's Atrato River and to Bangladesh's rivers collectively. Each instance is celebrated as a victory of “Earth jurisprudence” over the anthropocentric assumptions of traditional property law.

Yet every one of these grants of personhood stops at the border of the state that made it. A river does not stop there. The Ganga's principal tributaries rise outside India before the river ever touches Indian soil; the Mekong carries the consequences of upstream decisions through six riparian states even though only four of them belong to the treaty body that governs it. The Indus is a legal person nowhere, and the treaty that has allocated its waters for six decades is not currently even in operation between the two states that share it. This paper argues that the rights of nature movement, for all its doctrinal creativity, has so far been an exercise in domestic law dressed up as environmental philosophy and that international law has not yet built the machinery to carry a river's “rights” across a boundary line.

II. The Domestic Personhood Wave

II.I New Zealand's Te Awa Tupua Act

The Whanganui settlement is the most doctrinally complete of the personhood statutes. Section 14 declares Te Awa Tupua is a legal person AMF has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person,” exercised by two guardians, Te Pou Tupua, one appointed by the Crown and one by Whanganui iwi. Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, Sections 12, 14, 18 (N.Z.). The scheme is entirely within one sovereign's territory and one catchment that never crosses a border.

II.II India's Ganga-Yamuna Experiment

The Uttarakhand High Court relied heavily on the New Zealand precedent, stating that Ganga and Yamuna “juristic/legal persons/living entities” and assigned state officials as (loco parentis) guardians. Mohd. Salim v. State of Uttarakhand, Writ Petition (PIL) No. 126 of 2014 (Uttarakhand H.C. 20 Mar. 2017). The order was stayed within months by the Supreme Court in State of Uttarakhand v. Mohd. Salim, Special Leave to Appeal (C) No. 16879/2017 (7 July 2017), which made the order stop working and appeal as of now still not decided. The stop is helpful. The main problem that was not fixed was exactly that a river cannot be responsible in the same way a real person can when the area around the river goes beyond the court’s own reach.

II.III Colombia and Bangladesh

Colombia's Constitutional Court took a different route in Centro de Estudios para la Justicia Social “Tierra Digna” v. Presidencia de la República, Sentencia T-622/16 (10 Nov. 2016), Saying the Atrato River has rights based on the rule of biocultural rights and setting up a joint responsibility between the community and the state. Bangladesh’s High Court Division went more saying all rivers in the country are legal persons at once. Human Rights and Peace for Bangladesh v. Bangladesh & Others, Writ Petition No. 13989 of 2016 (H.C.D. 30 Jan. 2019, full judgment released 1 July 2019). None of these systems says it can control a state and none has a way, for a foreign person who lives by the river to use or be affected by the personhood that is created.

III. The Transboundary Gap

III.I Existing Watercourse Treaties Ignore Personhood

International water law has been developed in a different way from the rights of nature movement and these two things have not come together yet. The Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, 36 I.L.M. 700 (opened for signature 21 May 1997, entered into force 17 Aug. 2014), codifies equitable and reasonable utilisation and a duty not to cause significant harm, but it treats the watercourse throughout as a shared resource to be allocated between sovereign users, never as a rights-holder. The Indus Waters Treaty, 419 U.N.T.S. 125 (India-Pak., 19 Sept. 1960), and the Agreement on the Cooperation for the Sustainable Development of the Mekong River Basin, 34 I.L.M. 864 (5 Apr. 1995), follow the same allocative logic, dividing flow and creating dispute-resolution bodies for co-riparian states while leaving the river itself an object of the bargain rather than a party to it. Notably, the Mekong Agreement binds only Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam; though geographically riparian, are dialogue partners with no obligations under it.

The Indus treaty shows how fragile a simple agreement can be. India stopped the Indus treaty from being used on 23 April 2025 a day after a terrorist attack happened in Pahalgam. Since then India has said that the treaty cannot work normally until Pakistan completely stops supporting -border terrorism. A Court of Arbitration at The Hague made some decisions that Pakistan uses to say the treaty is still valid. India does not accept the courts authority and has again said the treaty is not being used as recently as July 2026.

No matter what you think about this situation it shows that even the famous treaty about sharing water across borders in the world can be affected by the relationship between the countries that share the river. If we give the river its legal status it will have the same problems because international law does not protect the rivers status from the relationship between the countries that share it. This creates a situation when a river that is considered a person in one country flows into a country that does not consider it a person. If someone pollutes the Ganga river in a place upstream of India when the polluted water enters Uttar Pradesh it will be in a place where Indian courts see the river as a natural resource because the decision from Uttarakhand is not being used right now.

Even if that decision was being used it would only apply to people and places in India. Would not affect Nepal. Nepals laws would not be affected by Indias decision and Nepals decision would not be recognised in India. The rivers status changes when it moves from one country to another which is the kind of problem that international laws about sharing water were supposed to avoid but for sharing water not, for the rivers legal status.

Consider a watercourse rising in State A, which has enacted a rights-of-nature statute modelled on Te Awa Tupua, and flowing into State B, which has not. A guardian appointed under State A's law could, within State A, bring proceedings against a polluter for violating the river's right to flow and to be free of contamination. But once the harm crosses into State B, the guardian has no standing recognised there, because State B's law does not treat the river as capable of holding rights or being represented. Conversely, a dam built in State B that starves the river's flow in State A cannot be challenged in State A's courts on the river's own behalf, because the causing conduct sits wholly outside State A's jurisdiction, and no treaty vehicle currently exists to carry a personhood claim across that line. Transboundary personhood is, at present, a legal fiction that international law lets evaporate at the border.

IV. Towards a Framework

IV.I International Instruments as Building Blocks

Three existing strands of international law offer partial scaffolding. First, G.A. Res. 76/300, U.N. Doc. A/RES/76/300 (28 July 2022), recognising a universal human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, gives states a shared normative baseline that does not depend on any one state's domestic personhood doctrine, and could anchor a transboundary river's protection in human rights law rather than property law. Second, the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Convention), 996 U.N.T.S. 245 (2 Feb. 1971), already operates a form of shared international stewardship over transboundary water bodies through joint management commitments, offering an institutional template even though it does not confer personhood. Third, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers, drafted by the Earth Law Center with river-law experts from several jurisdictions since 2017, proposes a set of minimum rights, to flow, to be free of pollution, to native biodiversity, that states could adopt by treaty rather than unilateral statute, which would solve the cross-border recognition problem by making personhood itself a treaty obligation.

IV.II Bilateral or Multilateral Personhood Treaties and Institutional Guardianship Across Borders

The simplest way to solve this problem is also the difficult to achieve politically: we need a treaty. This treaty should be similar to the ones we already have for river commissions. With an extra part that says the watercourse is a legal person. The countries that share the water should work together to declare this and appoint a group to watch over the water. This group should be able to go to court in each country. We have done something like this before. The Mekong River Commission shows that countries that share a river can agree to work to manage it even if they value it differently. What we have not tried before is giving the water a status that is recognized by all the countries that share it. This means that if a guardian is appointed in one country they should be recognized in all the countries too. We can do this by adding a clause to the treaty that says all the countries will recognize each others decisions to what we do with arbitration awards under the New York Convention. The watercourse in this case would be treated like a person, with rights that are protected by law and the countries that share the watercourse would work together to make sure those rights are respected.

Even short of full treaty personhood, riparian states could establish a joint guardianship commission with a narrower, procedural mandate: standing to bring or defend claims concerning the river's ecological integrity in the domestic courts of every co-riparian state, without requiring each state to first recognise the river as a person under its own law. This mirrors how transboundary environmental impact assessment obligations already operate under the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context (Espoo Convention, adopted 25 Feb. 1991, entered into force 10 Sept. 1997), where a state's procedural duty to consult and assess extends across the border even though the underlying environmental interest is not framed as a rights-holder. A guardianship commission of this kind would let riparian states cooperate on a shared basin's ecological protection without any one state having to concede the deeper, more contested question of whether a river is truly a legal person, or merely a beneficiary of enforceable duties.

Both proposals face resistance. States that are upstream and have big hydropower or farming interests might see treaty personhood as something that limits their control over how water's used and developed not just a simple symbol. So any good agreement would need to say that recognition creates duties to protect, not that it gives up ownership or control. The idea of cross-recognition like the New York Convention also has limits. Recognizing an award from an arbitration means that people agreed to it before. Recognizing personhood means that civil law and common law countries need to agree on how they define legal personality and guardianship which are very different. So refusing on public policy grounds is a possibility, not a far-fetched one. There is also the problem of people who are supposed to act as guardians but end up working for the state’s interests of the river’s. This is a problem that has already been mentioned about domestic guardianship systems. The Mekong River Commission is an example of this. A big upstream state is not part of the group all which shows how cooperative organizations can lack real power even if the other countries want to work together. These problems don’t end the argument for personhood but they do explain why a smaller more procedural guardianship commission might be a better first step. Countries have usually been more ready to accept rules about being consulted and having standing like, under the Espoo Convention than to agree that a river is really a rights-holder.

V. Conclusion

The rights of nature movement has won a fight. It has persuaded courts and legislatures that a river is not just something people own. Now the movement has a job to do. It needs to make sure that when a river goes through than one country it is treated the same way everywhere. Until countries that share a river work out a way to agree on how to treat the river it will be a little confusing. In one country the river will have rights. In the next country it will just be a resource that people can use. The person looking out for the river will only have power in their country. As soon as the river crosses into another country that person will not have any power to protect it. This is a problem because the river does not care about the lines on a map that people have drawn. The rights of nature movement needs to figure out how to make the rights of the river travel, across these lines. The rights of nature movement is still working on this.