Friday, February 28, 2025

January 31, 2025

A New Zealand Mountain Has Been Recognised As A Legal Person

Mount Taranaki now has all the rights, responsibilities of a living person.

[Imagesource: Goodfon]

Mount Taranaki in New Zealand was recognised as a legal person on Thursday after a new law granted it all the rights and responsibilities of a human being.

Also known as Taranaki Maunga, its Māori name – the pristine, snow-capped dormant volcano is the second highest on New Zealand’s North Island at 2,518 meters and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.

The law passed Thursday gives Taranaki Maunga all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. Its legal personality has a name: Te Kāhui Tupua, which the law views as “a living and indivisible whole.” It includes Taranaki and its surrounding peaks and land, “incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements.”

“The mountain has long been an honored ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual sustenance and a final resting place.”

The ruling also acknowledges the mountain’s theft from the Māori of the Taranaki region after New Zealand was colonised and fulfils an “agreement of redress” between the country’s government and Indigenous people.

The mountain’s name was changed when New Zealand was colonised in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the British explorer Captain James Cook also naming it Mount Egmont when he spotted the peak from his ship in 1770.

Mount Taranaki [Image: David Duncan] 
In 1865, a vast swathe of Taranaki land, including the mountain, was confiscated to punish Māori for rebelling against the Crown. Over the next century, hunting and sports groups had a say in the mountain’s management – but Māori did not.

According to Paul Goldsmith, the lawmaker responsible for the settlements between the government and Māori tribes, “Traditional Māori practices associated with the mountain were banned while tourism was promoted.”

But a Māori protest movement of the 1970s and ‘80s led to a surge of recognition for the Māori language, culture and rights in New Zealand law. Redress has included billions of dollars in Treaty of Waitangi settlements — such as the agreement with the eight tribes of Taranaki, signed in 2023.

“Today, Taranaki, our maunga, our maunga tupuna, is released from the shackles, the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate.”

New Zealand was the first country in the world to recognize natural features as people when a law passed in 2014 granted personhood to Te Urewera, a vast native forest on the North Island. Government ownership ceased and the tribe Tūhoe became its guardian.

Awarding the mountain personhood will stop forced sales, restore its traditional uses and allow conservation work to protect the native wildlife that flourishes there. Public access will however remain.

[Source: CNN]