‘Rights of Nature: A Utopia in the Present?’ was the question posed by participants at the conference of the same name held at Sigmund Freud PrivateUniversity (SFU) Vienna on 9 May 2025. International and Austrian experts in the field of ‘rights of nature’ explored the following questions during the event: In which countries are rights of nature already enshrined in (constitutional) law? What legal and philosophical considerations underlie rights of nature? And how can rights of nature be made operational?

Our colleague Camilla Haake, postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Fundamental and Human Rights (LBI-GMR), gave a presentation on ‘Current developments in the field of rights of nature in Germany’ in the first of three panels on the topic of ‘Rights of nature in a comparative perspective.’ She then discussed the fundamentals of the current developments in the field of ‘rights of nature’ in South America, Spain and Germany with Alex Putzer, Università Ca’Foscari, María Valeria Berros, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, and Eduardo Salazar Ortuño, Universidad de Murcia. The discussion was moderated by Verena Madner, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU).

Camilla Haake is a postdoctoral researcher at the LBI-GMR in the programme line ‘Sustainability, Development, Business, Social (NEWS), where she works on topics related to human rights and the environment, human rights and the economy and ‘rights of nature’. In her presentation, she outlined German national court rulings relating to the topic of ‘rights of nature’ and civil society engagement aimed, among other things, at amending the German Basic Law to include specific ‘rights of nature’ in the sense of an ‘ecological’ extension of the law.