UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs

The 2016 Colombian Final Peace Agreement set up an innovative framework for the transitional justice process in Colombia.  The Agreement deals with the relevant environmental dimensions of the Colombian armed conflict, such as the historical struggle for land and its equitable distribution or illicit crops as a root cause of and means for perpetuating the conflict.  However, the Agreement says little about other conflict-environment connections, namely, how to deal with ecological degradation or destruction by war—nature as a victim—and how to seize the conservation opportunities that the conflict presented—nature as a beneficiary.  These silences were amplified by the environmental crisis triggered by deforestation in the Colombian Amazon after the armed conflict ended.  This emergency arguably boosted pioneering litigation strategies that mobilized rights-based arguments to protect fragile ecosystems and denounced deforestation as a causal mechanism of climate change.  The Justice Supreme Court's historic ruling protects future generations' rights and declares the Amazon a subject of rights.  In tandem with a foundational precedent, the Atrato River case, this Article explores how intergenerational equity and the rights of nature—founding ideas of these decisions—may turn into valuable lessons for environmental justice and present precious opportunities to fill environmental gaps in the transitional justice architecture.