University of Toulon: International Proclamation of the Charter on the Law of the Living

As the culmination of the university’s trilogy about the legal personhood of animal, the Charter on the Law of the Living aims, like the Declaration of Toulon, to inspire institutional reforms in France and abroad. Faced with Nature’s unprecedented decline and the accelerating rate of species extinction, experts from the UN’s Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) are calling for “transformative changes” that could act as “New Paradigms, goals and values.» The Charter on the Law of the Living fits into this perspective by recalling certain forms of solidarity and the need to maintain a balance between the interests of human beings, Animals and Nature. It thus offers different keys to interpretation, facilitating the transition from a law “about” the living to a law “of” the living.The coordinator of the HwN Program, Maria Mercedes Sanchez, will deliver a keynote speech before the proclamation of the Charter (simultaneously translated into French, English and Spanish) broadcast on the University’s YouTube channel, as well as on its Facebook page. The Charter is the culmination of a scientific trilogy on the legal personhood of animals – a French research program started by Caroline Regad and Cédric Riot, lawyers at the University of Toulon – that calls for a reformulation of the category of legal personhood to include non-human persons. The trilogy is intended to inspire national and international discourse on the legal personhood of animals.The first chapter gave rise to a proposal to draft a text of law aimed at integrating the concept of non-human natural personhood in the French legal system.The second was marked by the proclamation, on 29 March2019, of the Toulon Declaration issued in response to the Cambridge Declaration of July 7, 2012.It has since been spread around the world by actors who want to change the legal status of animals.The third chapter of the trilogy will conclude with the proclamation of the Charter on the Law of the Living, with the objective to inspire reforms and incorporate the legal personhood of animals into the legal systems of more states.