This is a draft of a speech given at Kobe University in May 2026. The actual speech was shorter and less to the point, yet the principal arguments were the same.
Last November, the IUCN World Conservation Congress adopted Resolution 54, titled ‘Recognition of the Rights of Antarctica’. Acknowledging ‘the existence of global initiatives which aim to recognise Antarctica’ as a legal person the World Congress now engaged the IUCN directorate and its relevant divisions ‘to thoroughly evaluate the concept of the fundamental rights of Antarctica and corresponding duties of humans’.
In response to this call, I offer a critical assessment of the Rights of Antarctica Declaration.
The Antarctica Declaration
The draft identifies Antarctica as an ‘indivisible, autonomous and self-regulating community of inter-dependent Antarctic beings’ that possesses a unique ‘spirit’, and recognises it as a legal person. [AD, Art II, III.1] As an entity with legal personality, Antarctica would be recongised as having ‘the right to independence’, ‘jurisdiction within its territory’, and ‘the right to equality in law with States’. [AD III.2 and AD V.1.b and VIII.1.b-c]
Furthermore, ‘each State’ has supraconstitutional obligations to ‘take legislative and other measures’ to ‘recognise and respect the legal status of Antarctica’, and ‘[a]ny provision of international … law, that is inconsistent with’ the Declaration ‘is invalid and of no force or effect’ . AD Art XIV] Ultimately, the Antarctica Declaration grounds its legitimacy on natural law:
the pre-existing, intrinsic and inalienable rights, which are recognised in this Declaration, were not created by humans, preceded human laws, and cannot be altered by humans. In other words, since human laws cannot overrule the laws of Nature (which must take precedence)…
I will suggest that the Antarctica Declaration as a proposition of an artificial revolutionary theology .
II. On Revolutionary Theology
In 1789, the French revolutionary assembly gave the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, a seminal moment of liberal Enlightenment that was ultimately to give rise to the language of modern human rights.
One of the first principles of the new Republic was the abolition of the special status of the Church and the establishment of a secular, lay State.
In the restless war that followed – the French Republic against Europe and against its internal dissidents – the Revolution descended into the era of deliberate state terror, where a twelve-man Committee of Public Safety effectively ruled across the republican state and society on the justification of necessity and state of exception. They famously adopted a policy of Terror which was necessary to instil virtue in the citizens. Tens of thousands of persons lost their lives on the guillotine.
The Revolution culminated on 7 May 1974, and the Decree for Establishing the Worship of the Supreme Being. [Decret of 18 Floréal, An II.] Here the Revolution now abandoned its separation of religion from the state. By the Decree, the French people ‘recognise[d] the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul'[art 1] and ‘that the worship worthy of the Supreme Being’ was one of ‘the duties of man’.[art 2] At the heart of these duties were the obligation ‘to detest bad faith and tyranny … to relieve the unfortunate, to respect the weak [and] to defend the opporessed’.[art 3] To the public practice of this religion, the Decree mandated every tenth day of the calendar to festivals dedicated to thirty-six themes, starting with the festival to ‘the supreme being and to nature’.[art 7] To make no mistake about the nature of this religion, ‘in case of disturbances … by counter-revolutionary insinuations, those who may provoke them [shall be] punished with all the severity of the law.’
The Cult of the Supreme Being turned out to be a miserable flop. Within a month or so,, Robespierre was guillotined together with twenty others. By September of the same year, a new law declared that the Republic would not cover any religious expenses, and soon all religious alignment was removed from the Republic.
The Decree, and its fundamentally miscalculated invasion of the people’s private conciences played a key role in delegitimisng the revolutionary rule.
By imposing a set of faiths and beliefs, and by mandating the observance of a clumsily improvised set of empty rituals under the threat of death, the Republic invaded a sphere that it could not conquer.
Furthermore, the sheer mediocrity and embarrassing shallowness of the Cult and its values shattered the imaginary distance between the governing class and the governed, revealing that the emperor had no clothes at all.
The story of the French revolutionary theology stands as a reminder of the distinction between authentic religious tradition and the fabrication of bogus religions.
III. The Rights of Nature
When Friedrich Nietzsche famously posited the death of God he was referring to the fundamental impact of Enlightenment on the West, leading to the displacement of Christianity as the civilisation’s foundation but leaving in its wake an uncertainty about the proper moral anchoring of a liberal society.
Nietzsche suggested that for the time being, the West would carry its Christian morality under secular guises and languages, until eventually these divine echoes would either disintegrate into nihilism.
One of the most enduring and celebrated embodiment of old Western Christian morality have been the vocabulary of human rights.
Every generation of human rights has had its dark sides. The original first generation of liberties led to the unjustified protection of many privileges.
The second generation – economic and social rights – stumbled upon the inferiority of human planning and diktat in comparison to the aggregate algorithms of the free market and voluntary choice. — as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 undeniably demonstrated.
The third generation of human rights – that of collective rights and group rights – has famously proceeded from the protection of minorities and indigenous ways of life towards an ever-more demanding politics of identities, and a return to race theory and racial comparison, especially among English-speaking academia.
The fourth generation of human rights theory — that of animal rights, and the rights of nature — seeks to transcend the remaining limitations of the third, by doing away with the qualified ‘human’ altogether. Rights of nature thinking attacks the anthropocentric exceptionalism still inherent in modern legal systems. Its answer is to posit for example that “Mother Earth and all beings are entitled to all the inherent rights … without distinction of any kind, such as may be made between organic and inorganic beings, species, origin, use to human beings, or any other status”[UDRME Art 1(5).]
In doing so, the movement reinvents the Cult of the Supreme Being, summoning into existence a new deity whose common good it posits as taking precedence over that of humanity.