Can a river defend itself in court? Berlin says yes and has a draft law to prove it

Berlin’s Spree river has been off-limits for swimming for a hundred years. The water quality in the inner city falls short of what EU law requires. When it rains heavily, which happens around sixty days a year, Berlin’s sewer system overflows into the river. Everyone agrees it is a problem. Nobody has fixed it.

Rechte der Natur e.V., the German organisation coordinating the Rights for Nature ECI, thinks it knows part of the reason why: there is no single actor with a legal obligation and the authority to act for the Spree itself. Responsibility is distributed across multiple bodies with different priorities, and the river, as a legal object rather than a legal person, cannot speak for itself.

In October 2025, the organisation and multiple partners presented a concrete response: a draft law, developed with environmental lawyers, administrative law specialists, and academics, that would recognise the Spree as a legal person with rights to exist, to regenerate, and to be represented in court. The proposal, the Spree-Rechte-Gesetz, was developed together with the Symbiotic Lab and Green Legal Impact, and presented at Berlin’s Humboldt Lab alongside an exhibition on water in the city.

The draft is explicit about what it is: a legal experiment, not a finished text. But it demonstrates in concrete terms what a Rights of Nature framework could look like in a German and European legal context. The Spree is to receive two bodies – a main operational board responsible for monitoring, communication with authorities, litigation, and finances, and a fifteen-member expert council of scientists with an advisory and veto function. The model draws directly on the Mar Menor precedent in Spain, which the team studied closely when drafting the proposal.

“It is about increasing accountability for the protection of the Spree and clarifying responsibilities,” says Jakob Kukula, from the Symbiotic Lab. In practice, he argues, ecosystems are often degraded not because there are no rules, but because no single actor takes responsibility and environmental organisations rarely have the capacity to monitor every affected waterway.

A petition calling on the Berlin parliament and the Governing Mayor to take up the proposal has been launched, with a target of 30,000 signatures. The initiative has already attracted coverage in taz - die tageszeitung and Legal Tribune Online, and will be among the ecosystem stories featured at the Rights for Nature ECI launch event in Strasbourg on 25 March 2026.

The Spree may not have legal rights yet. But the conversation has started and it is exactly the kind of conversation this European Citizens’ Initiative exists to scale.

Photo: Pexels