By Catalina Vallejo
Our team members Catalina Vallejo and Rahul Ranjan attended the launch of the More Than Human Rights (MOTH) Project on September 22-24 in Tarrytown, NY State (USA). This project is an initiative of the Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law led by Professor Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, a member of the advisory board of our project.
The More Than Human Rights Project seeks to advance ideas, methods, tools, and strategies to secure the rights of humans, non-humans, and the web of life that comprise the ‘more than human’ world. It was created to gather leading and forward-thinking scientists, journalists, Indigenous leaders, lawyers, writers, scholars, judges, and activists. Its launching meeting sought to lay the foundation for this long-term project and discuss contributions to its first collective publication.
MOTH Collective participants include David Abram (author, The Spell of the Sensuous), Craig Kauffman (University of Oregon, leads Earth Jurisprudence Monitor), Patricia Gualinga (Indigenous leader of the Sarayaku Nation, Ecuadorian Amazon), Justice Antonio Benjamin (Supreme Court of Brazil), Robert Macfarlane (University of Cambridge), Emily Jones (University of Essex), Ramiro Avila Santamaría (former Justice of the Constitutional Court of Ecuador; Simón Bolívar Andean University, Ecuador), Justice Ana Manuela Ochoa Arias (Special Tribunal for Peace, Colombia), Andrea Wulf (author, The Invention of Nature), and Wašté Win Young (Standing Rock), among other prominent scholars, journalists, activists and artists.