NEW Zealand’s Whanganui river has been recognised as a living entity with the legal status of a person. The nation’s parliament passed a bill to allow the Whanganui to represent its own interests and advocate on its own behalf. The river will have its own legal identity with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person.

In the bill, there is no legal difference between damaging the river and damaging the people. They are one and the same and subject to same charges and prosecution in the eyes of the law.

New Zealand’s attorney-general and minister for treaty negotiations Chris Finlayson said the move was unprecedented, but not strange and was equivalent to assigning legal personality to companies. Granting a legal personality to a river is unique. The picturesque river, New Zealand’s third-longest, winds about 180 miles along the west of the North Island.

In 2013, the Urewera National Park was also recognised as a legal entity with all the rights of a person. In India, too, the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganges as India’s first living entity. The status gives the Ganges, one of India’s largest rivers, the same legal rights as a human being.

In accordance with the new category, anyone polluting the river or harming it anyway can be penalised the way a court can punish someone injuring a human being.

As the Indus is the lifeline of Sindh and subjected to indiscriminate untreated municipal and industrial wastewater discharges all along its length, the supreme court should declare the Indus a living entity.

F. H. Mughal

Karachi

Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2017