ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical analysis of legal approaches to landscape. It explores the potential and limits of law concerning rights to landscape and what they entail as well as rights of landscape (or 'agency') of non-human entities such as nature and the environment. It discusses landscape rights and agency fifteen years after the adoption of the European Landscape Convention (ELC). The European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms makes no reference to landscape or the environment in its text or protocols. In most cases of the European Court of Human Rights dealing with landscape, landscape 'protection' comes into conflict with other human rights and is in fact the reason for the alleged violation. Many cases concerning rights to landscape in the Inter-American system concern the challenge to the granting of logging or mining concessions on communal or ancestral lands, where a community lacks proper title but has traditionally occupied the area.
