Procedural Translation: A Diagnostic Account of Recognition Architecture, Procedural Demand, and the Translation of Relational Legal Subjectivity

Within a two-day span in late May 2025, a German court dismissed a climate claimcarrying relational content while the Inter-American Court of Human Rightsrecognized Nature and its components as subjects of rights. This paper develops adiagnostic account of that divergence, organized around two variables. The first isrecognition architecture: the institutional source, relational density, and — as aboundary case drawn from India’s stayed Ganga/Yamuna personhood ruling shows —the institutional authority and durability of whatever grants a non-human entity legalrecognition. The second is procedural demand, disaggregated here into twoanalytically distinct dimensions rather than a single ordinal continuum: allocationpressure (whether a procedure requires allocating responsibility among identifiedparties) and specification pressure (how much a tribunal must concretize rights,duties, or remedies), a distinction motivated directly by the Inter-American Court’sAdvisory Opinion OC-32/25, which imposed low allocation pressure yet substantialspecification pressure. Five cases — Lliuya v. RWE AG, Ecuadorian Rights of Naturelitigation, Atrato River, OC-32/25, and Mohd. Salim v. State of Uttarakhand — areexamined not as points on a validated gradient but as a diagnostic typology oftranslation modes: exclusion, substitution, administrative translation, normativeextension, and institutional contestation. The paper’s most defensible finding,developed through Atrato, is that procedural translation need not entail doctrinalerasure: a relational subject may remain doctrinally recognized while its remedy isoperationalized through technocratic vocabularies. Throughout, the paper disclosesrather than conceals the limits of a five-case comparison — small sample,defendant-type confounding, canopy endogeneity, and an outcome-informed typology— and offers its distinctions as testable diagnostic propositions rather than anestablished causal regularity.