Legislating for those not yet born

← Back to the blog · September 9, 2026

What a “well-being law for future generations” means, and why more and more territories are exploring it.

The starting point

My article starts from an observation: for centuries, ethics and law dealt almost exclusively with the present, and when future generations were mentioned in a legal text, it was in the preamble, without enforceable legal consequences. In the piece I argue that this cycle is changing, and I set out to explain why. I draw on references that mark the beginning of this sensibility — the Bemidji Declaration of North American Indigenous communities on the stewardship of the seventh generation (2005-2006) and the United Nations Brundtland Report (1987), which already warned that “we have been borrowing environmental capital from future generations without any intention or prospect of repaying it” — and I pose the article’s central question: why did it take so long to translate into legal terms a universally accepted ethical value (caring for children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren), and what is changing so that it is finally starting to happen. I set the context with environmental data (forest loss, the decline of ecosystem services, ocean acidification) not as alarmism, but as the backdrop that explains why intergenerational equity has gone from a philosophical question to a cutting-edge legal one.

Future generations as subjects of rights

The doctrinal core of my article argues that future generations can and should be conceived as subjects of rights. Against the classic objection — that if they do not exist in the present, they cannot hold rights — I argue in the piece that the legal system already admits obligations without a current holder (the nasciturus, foundations set up for people not yet born), and that there is no reason not to extend that construction to an intergenerational scale. Present generations, I argue, hold obligations toward future ones, even though the latter cannot yet exercise their rights themselves.

To this I add the notion of common environmental heritage: not an asset that the present generation may administer with full freedom, but a patrimony received in trust, which must be passed on in conditions that allow those who succeed us an equivalent or greater level of well-being. Transferring this fiduciary logic from private law to public law is, to me, what distinguishes a generic environmental sensibility from a genuine doctrine of intergenerational equity. Since rights are human constructs that have evolved historically — and today are recognized for subjects that are not living persons in the strict sense — I conclude that there is no theoretical obstacle to future generations holding legal personality; and for those who see this as excessively disruptive, I propose as an intermediate formula attributing that capacity to act to a representative institution: the Future Generations Defender.

Support in case law and international law

The article recalls that intergenerational equity is not a recent normative occurrence, but the consolidation of a principle that international case law has been exploring for decades. I cite the 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on nuclear weapons (which expressly mentions “generations unborn”) and the 1997 judgment on the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros project between Hungary and Slovakia.

I give particular weight to an “unprecedented convergence” of rulings between 2024 and 2025: the advisory opinion of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (May 2024), the first to incorporate intergenerational equity as an interpretive principle on climate change; Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which requires OAS member states to guarantee environmental conditions that give future generations similar development opportunities; and the July 2025 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, which establishes the fiduciary duty of present generations to preserve the planet. A fourth opinion remains pending, requested from the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which introduces an unprecedented category: the “ancestral rights” of past generations alongside those of the present and future, in line with African worldviews of continuity between ancestors, the living, and those yet to be born.

Constitutional precedents

Before any “well-being law” existed in the strict sense, numerous states had already written the protection of future generations into their constitutional texts. The oldest precedent is the Norwegian Constitution of 1814. It is followed, among others, by Article 20a of the German Basic Law (1994) and more declaratory mentions in the constitutions of Russia, Bhutan, Venezuela, and the United States.

I highlight in particular the Latin American developments: Bolivia (articles 9 and 33), Argentina (article 41), and above all Ecuador, whose 2008 Constitution directly recognizes rights for nature (“Pacha Mama”) and enshrines “intergenerational responsibility” in the management of non-renewable resources. I add the case of Kenya (2010), which extends this logic beyond the environment to the principles of public finance, requiring the burdens and benefits of public debt to be shared equitably across generations.

Anatomy of the “well-being law for future generations”

The article identifies a common pattern across the different national initiatives, built on four elements:

• Long-term well-being objectives that are binding, not merely indicative — the most developed model is the Welsh Well-being of Future Generations Act of 2015, with seven national goals.
• A duty of forward-looking assessment: administrations must evaluate and document in writing the impact of their decisions on future generations.
• The creation of an independent oversight institution (commissioner, defender, or office), with powers of advice, recommendation, and investigation.
• Accountability mechanisms: periodic reports, parliamentary appearances, and, at times, external audits.

I stress that this logic is not confined to environmental law: it can be transferred to urban planning, heritage protection, and, quite significantly, to budget law, insofar as it favors a model of preventive governance that anticipates harm at the moment of deciding, rather than reacting to it afterward.

A comparative view: from Wales to the United Nations

Although Wales draws the most international attention, the article recalls earlier experiences: the Committee for the Future of the Finnish Parliament (1993, permanent since 2000); Hungary’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations (2008, absorbed in 2012 into the Office of the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights); Belgium’s Federal Council for Sustainable Development (since 1997); and the Guardian of Future Generations created by Malta’s Sustainable Development Act (2012).

Outside Europe, I cite New Zealand’s Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (1986) and Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, both backed by multidisciplinary teams that have become a technical reference point for later proposals.

In Spain, I highlight Law 10/2023 on the well-being of present and future generations of the Balearic Islands — born from a popular legislative initiative, with a dedicated Commission and mandatory intergenerational impact reports — and the ongoing work in the Canary Islands to adopt an equivalent law. At the European level, I mention the creation of the first Commissioner for Intergenerational Equity, under the EU’s Strategy on Intergenerational Equity of March 2026; and globally, the Declaration on Future Generations adopted at the United Nations’ Summit of the Future in September 2024, with thirteen commitments including the possibility of creating an envoy for future generations.

From this accumulation of initiatives — regional, state, national, and multilateral — within the span of a decade, I draw an interim conclusion: this is not an isolated legislative fashion, but a normative trend consolidating at an unusual speed within public law.

The limits of the current model

While valuing these advances, the article is explicit about what they still fail to achieve: in none of these models do future generations acquire the status of rights holders. Legally, they remain the object of an administrative duty of care, not subjects of a legal relationship enforceable by themselves or through a representative with full standing. Non-compliance rarely carries a direct sanction, and in most cases there is no standing — not even for the commissioner themselves — to demand enforcement before the courts.

I also point to a structural risk: the effectiveness of these institutions ultimately depends on the political will that sustains them. As examples of that fragility, I cite the reduction of powers suffered by the Hungarian commissioner in 2012 and the practical abandonment of the Balearic law following a change in the political cycle.

Proposal: scalability and a global network of defenders

The article argues that one of the virtues of this model is its scalability: it can be implemented at the local, regional, state, or international level, and these levels can coexist and reinforce one another, as already shown by the Balearic and Welsh experiences, processes underway in Scotland and Australia, and the United Nations itself moving — in an uncoordinated way — toward the same goal.

Building on this, I propose promoting a global network of Future Generations Defenders to share methodology, comparative case law, and joint advocacy capacity, taking as a reference already-existing organizations such as the Ibero-American Federation of the Ombudsman (1995). To me, intergenerational equity can only be effectively protected through collaboration between territories, because the problem it addresses — the distribution over time of natural heritage and resources — can only be resolved at a planetary scale.

Conclusions

• The fact that, in little more than a decade and across very different legal contexts, governments and international bodies are adopting the same institutional architecture is no coincidence: it responds to thirty years of case law and international treaties that were already pointing in that direction.
• The legal recognition of future generations has stopped being a doctrinal debate and has become a governance necessity recognized in practice.
• Each new “well-being law” should be understood not as a goal achieved, but as a step toward the goal still pending: the full recognition of future generations as rights holders, represented by a Defender with real capacity to act and standing to go to court, not merely to make recommendations to the administration.
• I believe that this next step is no longer a legal utopia, but the natural consequence of a path that numerous territories have already begun to travel independently and almost simultaneously; the task ahead is not to convince others that it is worth taking, but to complete it.

To me, giving those generations — silent but real — a legal voice of their own and institutions to defend them is, in the comparative law of the coming decades, one of the most urgent and necessary tasks.