60 Organisations and Growing: The Ocean Rights Movement is Making Waves!

New website offers toolkits, legal trackers, and a unifying Declaration to mobilise action for the Ocean across cultures and legal systems.

Four months after launching our global hub, the Ocean Rights Movement has surged to 60 organisation and entity supporters from 20+ countries. Powered by Ocean Vision Legal and Gallifrey Foundation, the website serves as a central hub for Ocean Rights by bringing together educational tools, legal and policy tracking, and stakeholders who support the protection of the Ocean’s intrinsic values from across the globe. 

Envisioned from the growing Rights of Nature (RoN) movement, Ocean Rights brings visibility to the Ocean at a time when the Ocean is largely ignored and Ocean health continues to decline. Over 400 RoN laws, policies and judicial decisions exist worldwide, with only approximately ten-fifteen percent of these specific to marine ecosystems and species. As the life supporting system of the planet, addressing this gap is critical. 

Building a Movement for Ocean Rights

In March 2022, The Ocean Race, Earth Law Center (through Michelle Bender), Nature’s Rights and the municipality of Genoa launched the initiative towards a Universal Declaration of Ocean Rights (UDOR). The Ocean Race provided a platform for eight ‘Innovation Workshops’ (termed the ‘Genova Process’), held March 2022-September 2023. The workshops gathered 150+ stakeholders of diverse expertise and geographic representations and initiated critical dialogues on the vision, scope, strategies, pathways and challenges towards international recognition of Ocean Rights.

Throughout the UDOR process, it became clear that we needed a robust and formal structure to coordinate and amplify international action and advocacy. For the initiative to succeed in its goal of achieving a Universal Declaration, or similar, by 2030, consensus from all 193 UN Member States is needed. Therefore, the UDOR needed to become much more than an initiative; it needed to become a movement, a movement capable of reaching every person and State. A movement of this scale requires coordinated advocacy and a consistent voice. 

It is also our foundational belief that the Ocean Rights Movement needs to be inclusive and embrace legal pluralism. In perhaps one of the most insightful workshops held through the Genova Process, we primarily gathered Indigenous and Oceanic Peoples at a workshop held alongside IMPAC5 in Vancouver. At the forefront of dialogue was the understanding that the term Ocean Rights is a Western legal construct. However, the aspiration it reflects—the need to live in a respectful, reciprocal relationship with the Ocean—is shared across cultures, worldviews and legal systems. Many Indigenous and customary frameworks already embody ethical relationships with the Ocean that go beyond the Western language of rights. Recognising this, OVL does not seek to impose a singular legal approach, but rather to support and monitor the diverse and context-specific ways in which States, communities and institutions are working to advance an ethical relationship with the Ocean. Doing so ensures flexibility in our approach and allows all stakeholders to feel aligned and supported.

While internationally focussed RoN declarations can bring attention and appear bold and unifying, they carry significant shortcomings: they are often driven by small groups of individuals or created unilaterally by one organisation, adopt universalist framings that impose ideas rooted in specific cosmologies or places as globally applicable. Many declarations lack engagement with contemporary technical and juridical realities, as well as input from stakeholders intimately involved in the area of focus. Further, they can take a combative advocacy tone that can limit uptake within formal legal processes. Therefore there are rightfully unresolved strategic questions about how—if at all—they can be meaningfully transposed into entrenched governance arenas. The learnings from previous processes such as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth should be heeded. Thus, we seek to build Ocean Rights in the right way—carefully, strategically, and with attention to power, place and process. For this reason, we have not drafted an Ocean Rights Declaration. This is also why our focus this year will be launching a global stakeholder consultation to understand how and in what way a Declaration of Ocean Rights can truly be embraced by all. 

What is next for the Ocean Rights Movement?

The launch of the Ocean Rights website marks a transition from an initiative to a fully structured global Movement. With a growing coalition of 60 organisations and counting, the focus is now on concrete action, coordination, and building the necessary clarity to achieve a UDOR, or similar, by 2030.

This momentum is already translating into significant policy wins! We are thrilled to share that at the 2025 International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress, Members approved Motion 056, 'Advancing an ethical human-ocean relationship', receiving 92% approval from governmental groups and NGOs/Indigenous groups. This landmark motion calls for IUCN Members to support and adopt ethical approaches to Ocean governance, including by advancing national recognition of the Ocean's rights, and serves as a powerful starting point to initiate State dialogue and facilitate support for international action, such as a UDOR.

Follow us in 2026, as we focus on two key action areas:

1. Scaling the Movement: This includes launching the Ocean Rights Collective, a global coalition of organisations and entities coordinating international advocacy to advance an ethical human-Ocean relationship through the recognition of Ocean Rights and its underpinning principles, and holding regional workshops to build awareness and facilitate stakeholder dialogue. 

2. Building conceptual and strategic clarity around Ocean Rights: This includes translating the legal understanding of what Ocean Rights means in practice, and establishing a consistent, shared and inclusively built understanding of the Ocean and what rights the Ocean has.

Anyone can support and join the Movement for Ocean Rights. Visit the site to sign the Ocean Rights Declaration, and explore free resources, a global tracker and more at www.oceanrights.com. 

Alone we may create ripples, but together we can create waves!