🌍🌊📢 JOIN THE CALL FOR OCEAN RIGHTS 🐋🐡🦭

Overfishing, pollution, ocean warming… These major assaults are disrupting marine ecosystems, threatening the existence of marine creatures and the overall balance of our planet—the very foundation of our lives and those of our children.

We, elected officials from coastal cities and other jurisdictions, legal experts, scientists, and directly impacted citizens, are determined to halt this crisis and protect the Ocean’s balance so that marine species and ecosystems can thrive. Our expertise, coupled with direct exposure to and experience with marine declines, makes us acutely aware of the urgency and compels us to issue this call for immediate, concrete, and ambitious action.

📆 A remarkable opportunity lies ahead: This June, Nice will host the United Nations Ocean Conference. If we mobilize, we have a unique chance to make our voices heard at this crucial moment, when world leaders will gather, and to create a historic turning point for the protection of marine life and our collective future.

📑 With this petition, we call for the recognition of the rights and intrinsic value of the Ocean in the Declaration: "Our Ocean, Our Future: Accelerating Action."

If we succeed, this would concretely allow us to:

1. Advance Ocean Rights worldwide by replicating victories already achieved by leading countries such as Ecuador, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Spain, ensuring the creation of safe zones where Ocean rights take precedence over harmful industrial activities and exploitation.

2. Defend the right of every marine ecosystem and creature to exist, ensuring that human activities at sea respect the Ocean’s vital cycles, functions, and processes.

3. Give marine ecosystems and species a formal voice in decision-making through legal guardianship bodies and other mechanisms, ensuring their interests are directly represented and protected.

4. Take legal action on behalf of the Ocean to halt destructive projects and protect its right to exist, thrive, regenerate, and evolve.

5. Strengthen the power of Indigenous Peoples, as well as local communities, to defend their rights and those of the interconnected marine environments they depend on and protect as stewards.

👎 If Ocean Rights remain unrecognized, we risk delaying essential transformative changes in our relationship with the Ocean, our economic models, and our institutions, leading to the accelerated destruction of key ecosystems and extinction of marine species.

🤝 We have only three months to convince decision-makers at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice to take action. Your support is crucial: sign, share, and join us in making the Ocean’s voice heard!

🧜‍♂️🧜‍♀️ Who are we?

This petition is backed by an international group of NGOs committed to defending the Ocean, including the French associations Wild Legal, Longitude 181, and Vagues, as well as Earth Law Center, Ocean Vision Legal (USA), and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, and supported by numerous personalities and associations.