From anti-apartheid to Antarctic rights — the radical legal vision of Cormac Cullinan

When Cormac Cullinan strolled into the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London earlier this month, he thought he was there to answer a few questions for a panel of judges. 

Cullinan, a Cape Town-based lawyer and a figurehead of the international Antarctic Rights initiative, had been shortlisted for the 2025 Shackleton Medal for the Protection of the Polar Regions. He insists he had no reason to expect he would win the £10,000 prize and a hand-struck silver medal.

Fellow nominees included polar luminaries — scientists, conservationists and contemporary explorers. Sir Ernest Shackleton’s granddaughter, Alexandra, was a judge.

“I was surprised to be shortlisted,” says Cullinan, the environmental lawyer who helped suspend Shell’s seismic surveys off South Africa’s Wild Coast.

Cullinan had let the organisers know he would be passing through London in early June, in case they wanted to meet him. The RGS’s official line was that the final decision was yet to be made. When they asked him to meet the executive, he assumed it was just part of the shortlisting process.

“It was a really amazing building,” he says. “On one corner is a statue of Shackleton, on the other David Livingstone. These great explorers had been members.”

He sat at the end of a table, surrounded by the RGS top brass and a publicity team. “I thought they were filming it because not all the judges were there.”

What happened next blindsided the South African.

‘I didn’t think my beard was rugged enough’

“They said, ‘Before you go, there’s just one more thing.’ They put a laptop in front of me,” Cullinan recalls. “It was the Shackleton award video. When it came to the end, it said, ‘And the 2025 winner is… ’ And this picture of me came up.”

The organisers had choreographed the moment to the last detail, complete with a photo shoot and Shackleton expedition-style jersey on hand — modelled after the one worn by the Irish explorer in a famous photograph. 

“At least it made me look more … Shackletonian,” Cullinan smiles. “Even if I didn’t think my beard was rugged enough.”

Cullinan, the legal pioneer behind the concept of earth jurisprudence, says the award is a collective recognition for the Antarctic Rights initiative. They had just met in Devon, followed by academic discussions in Oxford. 

“It was extraordinary synchronicity,” Cullinan says. 

Cullinan hopes the recognition from the Shackleton Medal will open doors. 

“This thing will give us huge leverage,” he says. 

An inclusive voice for the imperilled region 

At the core of the initiative is the radical idea that the frozen – but melting — Antarctic continent and surrounding ocean should be recognised as a legal person with its own voice in global governance. 

The initiative’s draft declaration supports human involvement in the region, such as science and activities like controlled tourism and fishing. 

Even so, Cullinan argues that Antarctica’s representative voice “would be a pure kind of voice for nature and Antarctica”. 

This probably means refining the Antarctic Treaty System in its present form, he argues, which he describes as secretive and often gridlocked by geopolitics.

‘I had to unlearn what my culture had taught me’

Cullinan’s path to the Shackleton Medal began on Durban’s segregated beaches during the final decade of apartheid.

“I cut my teeth as an anti-apartheid activist,” Cullinan says. A 1980 student exchange to New Zealand exposed him to an unflinching external view of his home country.

As a founding chair of the Durban Democratic Association, an affiliate of the non-racial United Democratic Front (UDF), Cullinan remembers organising “street marches to go on to segregated beaches and many different things … 

“I had been born into the oppressor class. When the scales fell from my eyes, I had to unlearn a lot of what I had absorbed unconsciously from apartheid society. I ended up leaving the country to avoid conscription, because I wasn’t going to fight for that army.” 

Thomas Berry, the American eco-theologian, gave Cullinan the concept to move from political activism into jurisprudence. That idea of unlearning dominance would become the philosophical heart of what Cullinan later called earth jurisprudence: a radical reimagining of the law and seeing it as intrinsic to the ecological order.

“Berry taught me that the philosophy of law only deals with humans and corporations. But legal philosophy needs to deal with all our relationships — including with beings other than humans,” Cullinan says.

A global movement for Antarctica — ‘modelled’ on the UDF

This led to his 2002 book Wild Law, which set out the founding principles of earth jurisprudence. 

From this grew a movement. In 2010, Cullinan was asked by Bolivian campaigners to lead the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Bolivia’s legislative assembly passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth that year — around the same time the lawyer helped co-found the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.

“To my mind it was modelled quite closely on the UDF in South Africa,” Cullinan says. “An alliance of organisations of many kinds, united around a few core principles.”

That idea — with nature as a legal subject and ecocide as the crime — neared a possible new frontier when Cullinan was approached by German MEP Carola Rackete in 2021. Rackete asked him: Could rights of nature be applied to Antarctica itself?

“I thought, ‘Well, if Antarctica is going to have rights, it has to be a person in the eyes of the law,’” he remarks. “I realised you’re talking for the first time about an ecological entity being a person under international law.”

‘Open’ for input

Cullinan and a working group of academics, lawyers and legal campaigners have set out to draft the Antarctica Rights Declaration, now open for feedback. 

It proposes rights for the region which would, in theory, enable the Antarctic to hold states or corporations accountable for actions that violate those rights.

To represent Antarctica’s interests in an international court, Cullinan suggests a kind of parliament may emerge — a representative body that appoints delegates to climate summits and biodiversity talks. 

Representation, he boldly adds, may even include participation in Antarctic Treaty consultative meetings, the annual governance gathering which this year opens in Milan on June 23. 

“What’s good for Antarctica,” presses the Shackleton Medal recipient, “is good for humanity.” DM