Bangladeshi rivers’ legal personhood meaningless without enforcement

In 2019, Bangladesh’s High Court declared rivers to be legal persons, granting them rights to protection. But weak enforcement, fragmented governance and political interference have undermined this ruling. Despite directives to curb pollution and encroachment, Bangladeshi rivers suffer ongoing harm. Institutional weaknesses, lack of local engagement and conflicting ministry roles render legal personhood merely symbolic. Effective reform requires stronger laws, empowered guardians and cohesive governance to protect rivers sustainably.

In 2019, in response to a public interest petition by the advocacy group Human Rights and Peace for Bangladesh, the High Court Division of Bangladesh’s Supreme Court declared all rivers in the country to be legal persons. This landmark judgment reimagined rivers not as property but as ‘living entities’ with rights to flow, regenerate and be protected. But without meaningful enforcement, this ruling is merely symbolic.

For centuries, rivers were dredged, leased and sacrificed for development. The law viewed them as extractable resources, ignoring their ancestral significance under colonial and bureaucratic systems. But this ontology is shifting. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood, echoing Maori beliefs: ‘I am the river, the river is me’. Similar legal debates challenging the anthropocentric viewpoint have emerged in Australia.

The Bangladesh High Court decision invoked the public trust doctrine and appointed the National River Conservation Commission (NRCC) as guardian in loco parentis (in place of a parent). The court issued 17 binding directives which evicted encroachers, criminalised pollution, mandated the receipt of NRCC ‘No Objection Certificates’ before any development project, created a satellite-based river database and integrated river protection into the school curriculum and media.

But on appeal, while the Appellate Division upheld rivers’ legal personhood, it softened the judgment. It reclassified key directives as obiter dicta non-binding judicial opinions rather than enforceable mandates, particularly where the High Court had instructed parliament to pass new laws or imposed harsh penalties. While the core legal recognition remains, this significantly curtailed the ruling’s enforcement power, exposing the fragility of environmental jurisprudence without executive will.

Despite the jurisprudential ambition, implementation remains elusive, as rivers continue to suffer relentless harm. Over 200 factories discharge untreated effluents into the Buriganga and Turag rivers, while illegal landfills, often backed by political patrons, narrow their banks. Around 50 unauthorised brick kilns choke the Padma River, many of which have been cited in High Court rulings. The Payra River — dredged year-round for a seaport and coal plant — is losing its natural flow in the name of development. These cases unravel the fiction of legal personhood without ecological guardianship.

In Bangladesh, fragmented institutional mandates, a toothless NRCC and obsolete laws, such as the River Protection Act 2013, reveal an ontological disjuncture. Without institutional reform, legal personhood is a metaphor entombed in political commitment. To treat rivers as rights-bearing subjects, the state must determine who speaks on their behalf and across which agencies. Bangladesh has not done so. Unlike New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua co-governance model, Bangladesh embeds no local or Indigenous river worldviews in its institutions.

Law may name the river a subject, but ministries still treat it as a project, plot, channel or drain. Different ministries relate to rivers through incompatible and often conflicting lenses. The Ministry of Water Resources views rivers as channels to be embanked and dredged, while the Ministry of Land treats riverbeds as leasable property. The Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority frames them as navigational routes and the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority uses them as sources for drainage and extraction.

These divergent ontologies are not merely semantic. 35 public agencies under 13 ministries govern water in Bangladesh, resulting in overlapping mandates and fragmented authority. This creates an institutional discord that recognises but routinely violates rivers’ legal personhood. While the NRCC is the court-appointed ‘guardian’ of rivers, it lacks enforcement power, inter-ministerial authority and local presence, rendering this role largely symbolic. In late 2022, the NRCC compiled a list of over 37,000 illegal riverbank structures across 48 rivers, after spending Tk 340 million (US$2.8 million) on a survey aimed at identifying encroachers and triggering legal action.

But after years of work, the commission abruptly chose not to publish the names, citing legal ambiguities over mapping standards. Even the partial list that had appeared on the NRCC’s website was removed in 2023 and the final report remains inaccessible to the public. Syeda Rizwana Hasan, now Bangladesh’s Environment Advisor, had said that the NRCC ‘apparently took the side of the encroachers’ by shielding their identities.

But despite that critique and clear High Court directives to name and disqualify grabbers, the list remains unpublished. This reflects institutional silence and raises the urgent question whether critiques from outside the system can be translated into reform from within.

Without consent mechanisms or inter-ministerial coherence, legal personhood collapses into fiction. River ‘guardians’ often double as violators running brick kilns, mining sand and grabbing land, shielded by political patronage.

Policymakers disregard the growing tension between economic growth and ecological survival. At Payra Port, over Tk 72.9 billion (US$597 million) was spent from 2020–23 on dredging, yet navigability remains poor, with the Rabnabad channel’s depth dropping from 10.5 metres to 5.9 metres, forcing costly rerouting via Chattogram. Mongla’s Pussur channel within the Sundarbans’ Ecologically Critical Area underwent constant dredging, with only 14 of 23 environmental impact statement benchmarks met. The channel also showed early evidence of irreversible estuarine harm.

As long as rivers remain voiceless in governance, legal personhood will remain elusive. Recognition remains legally ornamental unless it is grounded in enforceable authority and a coherent institutional design. To bridge the gap between law and life, Bangladesh must amend the River Protection Act, strengthen the NRCC’s authority and establish binding national guidelines. Only then can rivers’ legal identities be translated into rights, supported by action and protected from erasure.

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