The Human Right to Healthy Animals: How Anthropocentric and Ecocentric Reasoning Need Each Other in Constitutional Animal Protection

Faith Gakii

Faith Gakii is a researcher at the International Centre for Animal Rights and Ethics (ICARE)

Constitutional environmental law scholarship is organised around a familiar dichotomy. Anthropocentric provisions (the human right to a healthy environment, as enshrined in constitutions worldwide) primarily protect humans from environmental degradation, with environmental protection often arising insofar as it serves human interests. By contrast, ecocentric provisions recognise nature as a rights-holder deserving protection in its own right, independent of its utility to humans. The implicit assumption in much of the literature is that these two frameworks are rivals, and that meaningful progress requires choosing one over the other. As Vito De Lucia has observed, the narrative of a ‘long progression from anthropocentric to ecocentric articulations of environmental law’ informs ‘much, and perhaps most, environmental legal scholarship.’

This piece argues that the assumption is misleading, at least with respect to animal protection. Most constitutional systems are anthropocentric, and that is unlikely to change soon. The question is what can be done within them. Emerging jurisprudence from Brazil and Turkey suggests that when courts extend environmental protection to animals, they actively choose to adopt ecocentric reasoning, but they do so through anthropocentric constitutional provisions. The anthropocentric provision supplies the legal vehicle (standing, enforceability, existing constitutional text), while ecocentric reasoning supplies the interpretive method that extends those provisions to encompass animal protection. This vehicle-method lens is used to analyse jurisprudence from Brazil, Turkey, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR). What follows from this pattern is that there are openings for achieving constitutional animal protection that animal advocates and litigators are yet to fully exploit.

Human Dignity as a Springboard in Brazil

Brazil illustrates the dynamic most clearly. Article 225 of the Brazilian Constitution guarantees the human right to an ‘ecologically balanced environment’, which is an anthropocentric provision that, read narrowly, protects humans from ecological imbalance. However, in a 2019 decision concerning the guardianship of a wild parrot, the Superior Court of Justice did not read it narrowly. Applying what it called an ‘eco-centric jurisprudential matrix’, meaning an interpretive framework that treats the natural world as possessing value beyond its usefulness to humans, the Court held that the provision could be read to recognise non-human animals as holders of rights.

Crucially, the Court grounded this expansive interpretation in the ‘ecological dimension of the principle of human dignity’, that is, the idea that human dignity itself cannot be fully realised in a legal system that treats sentient animals as mere objects. This principle of reasonableness and dignity, rather than Article 225 alone, was the primary engine of the Court’s reasoning. As one analysis observes, the Court used ‘the seemingly restrictive language of the Brazilian Constitution as a springboard to address the Rights of Nature discourse.’ Article 225 and the principle of human dignity together supplied the vehicle, the constitutional basis that could be invoked, enforced, and adjudicated. The ecocentric method was what gave that vehicle its direction, extending it to recognise animals as bearers of interests in their own right.

Ecocentric Reasoning Imported into Turkish Constitutional Law

Turkey makes the interdependence even more visible, because the constitutional landscape is far more austere. Turkey has no rights of nature clause, no tradition of transformative constitutionalism, and no constitutional recognition of animal sentience. Even so, in a 2022 case, Constitutional Court President Zühtü Arslan dissented from a majority upholding procedural barriers to animal cruelty prosecutions, arguing that Article 56 of the Turkish Constitution (the right to a healthy and balanced environment) encompasses animal protection obligations.

His interpretive method was explicitly borrowed from abroad. Arslan cited the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court’s Estrellita decision directly as his model. Estrellita was an ecocentric ruling that recognised individual animals as rights-holders under Ecuador’s rights of nature clause. However, Ecuador’s constitutional framework is fundamentally different because its Constitution already embodies an ecocentric approach, which makes such an interpretation structurally easier. Arslan’s move was more ambitious. He sought to import ecocentric reasoning into a constitutional order that had no ecocentric provisions at all.

Where the Brazilian Court relied on the principle of human dignity as the doctrinal bridge between anthropocentric text and ecocentric outcome, Arslan’s bridge was twofold. First, he engaged Article 17 of the Turkish Constitution (the right to personal inviolability and the protection of physical and spiritual existence) alongside Article 56, reading the two provisions together to argue that the constitutional obligation to protect the integrity of living beings extends beyond human persons. Second, he drew on the factual interdependence of human and animal health, including zoonotic disease, antimicrobial resistance, and ecosystem integrity, to argue that protecting a ‘healthy and balanced environment’ necessarily encompasses the welfare of non-human animals within that environment. Again, the distinctly ecocentric element was not the appeal to One Health evidence in itself (which could support a purely instrumental argument), but the conclusion that animals possess interests that the constitutional order is obliged to recognise, not merely as instruments of human welfare but as part of the environment’s own integrity.

The legal vehicle was Article 56, an anthropocentric environmental right. The interpretive method was drawn from ecocentric jurisprudence in a different jurisdiction.

What Follows from the Interdependence

The emergent pattern is suggestive, not only because the conditions for its replication are widespread, but also because the same vehicle-method structure is now visible at the international level.

Though it has not yet addressed animal protection directly, the IACtHR’s jurisprudence is instructive here. Advisory Opinion OC-23/17  recognised the right to a healthy environment as an autonomous human right that ‘protects the components of the environment, such as forests, rivers and seas, as legal interests in themselves’. This was an anthropocentric vehicle generating ecocentric protection in a single formulation: the components of the environment were recognised as possessing legal significance beyond their service to human needs. Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 in July 2025 went further, formally recognising Nature as a subject of rights for the first time at the international level, while grounding this recognition in the human right to a healthy environment.

The doctrinal architecture is now in place. If Nature can be a rights-bearing subject through an anthropocentric vehicle, then individual animals, as part of nature, fall within the potential scope of that recognition. The step from recognising Nature’s rights to protecting individual animals has not yet been taken at the international level. That is work for advocates and litigators to do, and the IACtHR’s jurisprudence gives them a foundation to build on.

The same is true more broadly. Over 150 constitutions worldwide contain some form of environmental protection, and many enshrine a human right to a healthy environment. Article 13 TFEU recognises animal sentience in EU law. Additionally, KlimaSeniorinnen has expanded Article 8 ECHR to encompass environmental degradation. Neither provision has yet been read as generating animal protection obligations. However, the jurisprudence from Brazil and Turkey suggests that the doctrinal resources are available, and the IACtHR’s advisory opinions suggest they are available at the international level too. What is needed is for advocates and courts to interpret these existing provisions with the purposive ambition that ecocentric reasoning supplies, reading them not merely as shields against pollution, but as foundations for recognising that non-human animals have interests that the law is capable of protecting.

This piece neither resolves (nor seeks to resolve) the deeper theoretical debate between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. Instead, it suggests that the scholarly energy devoted to adjudicating between the two frameworks in the abstract has obscured a more immediate and practical question of how the two can interact in courtrooms when judges must decide cases with the constitutional text they have.

Faith Gakii is a researcher at the International Centre for Animal Rights and Ethics (ICARE)

Suggested citation: Faith Gakii, ‘The Human Right to Healthy Animals: How Anthropocentric and Ecocentric Reasoning Need Each Other in Constitutional Animal Protection’ IACL-AIDC Blog (2026) The Human Right to Healthy Animals: How Anthropocentric and Ecocentric Reasoning Need Each Other in Constitutional Animal Protection — IACL-IADC Blog