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The WTO Says Animal Welfare Is a “Globally Recognized Issue.” How Does That Change International Protection for Animals?

June 29, 2021

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Katie Sykes blogs on the threats that face animals in our globalized world.

In recent years animal welfare and animal rights have started to be taken more seriously in international legal scholarship. There is a nascent Global Animal Law movement that works to promote international legal protection for animals – meaning protection of individual animals as intrinsically valuable and significant beings, not just conserving aggregate populations of animals as valuable resources for human use. 

In a globalized world, the threats that face animals often have an international dimension. To name just a few examples, think of the 14,000 sheep that drowned in 2019 when a cargo ship en route to Saudi Arabia capsized in the Black Sea; the live animals on long international voyages that were caught in the delays when the Suez Canal was blocked by the grounded cargo ship Ever Given; the challenges of protecting species that migrate across international boundaries; and the effects of climate change and global environmental degradation on animal habitats and survival.

Global Animal Law scholars argue that we need an international law of animal protection to respond effectively to challenges like these, because uncoordinated domestic laws leave too many gaps.  And, on a more philosophical level, they (or, rather, we, since I include myself in this group) believe that a just international legal order must grapple with the ethical dimension of humanity’s relationship with nonhuman animals.

But attention to these issues in positive international law is still disappointingly sparse.  For years there have been discussions of an multilateral treaty on animal welfare, but the treaty does not exist.  A UN Declaration of Animal Welfare was drafted more than a decade ago, but it has lost momentum.  The jurisprudence of international courts and tribunals is almost completely silent on animal welfare and the moral significance of individual animals.

There is one notable exception: the EC—Seal Products case at the World Trade Organization.  This case started when the EU banned sales and imports of all seal products, citing the concerns of the European public about cruelty in the seal hunt.  Sealing nations Canada and Norway challenged the EU ban as an illegal restriction on international trade.  A WTO panel ruled on the case in 2013.  Here’s the rare exception to the general invisibility of animal welfare at international tribunals: the WTO panel stated that animal welfare is “a globally recognized issue” and “an ethical responsibility for human beings in general.” 

The panel’s decision was appealed to the WTO Appellate Body, which changed some aspects of the panel’s reasoning but came to a similar conclusion overall – and did not overturn or disavow the panel’s statements about the global significance of animal welfare.  Both the panel and the Appellate Body confirmed that concerns about animal welfare can be a legitimate reason to restrict trade under the “public morals” safe harbour in WTO law.  The ban survived (with some modifications), many other countries adopted similar bans on seal products, and commercial seal hunting has declined significantly.

This positive contribution to the development of global animal law from the WTO would have been pretty unexpected a decade or two ago.  In the 1990s and 2000s, many animal advocates saw the international trade regime as one of the greatest threats to progress on animal protection.  At the Seattle protests against the WTO in 1999, some of the demonstrators dressed up as turtles – a reference to their fear that the WTO would gut US trade restrictions on imported shrimp caught without equipment that protects endangered sea turtles from being caught in shrimp nets and drowned.  Governments dragged their heels on animal protection legislation that would affect trade, such as banning imports of cosmetic products tested on animals, invoking their worries about potential litigation at the WTO.

After EC-Seal Products, it is clear that WTO members can act to protect animals, not just for conservation purposes but also based on animal welfare concerns, without violating trade rules.  And the case is also important for the panel’s express recognition of the importance of animal welfare as a global concern and a responsibility of humanity.

It is not clear, however, how much difference this development has made or will make in practical terms to the global plight of animals.  Animal welfare protection is weak all over the world.  Even in the jurisdictions with the (relatively) strongest animal welfare laws, millions of animals endure almost unimaginable suffering, and the protections that do exist tend to be poorly enforced.  The WTO will not change this.  WTO law (as we know after EC—Seal Products) doesn’t have to prevent governments from legislating to protect animals – but it certainly doesn’t require it.  The WTO is not an animal welfare agency.  Its purpose is to facilitate global trade. Global trade in animals and animal products is steadily growing, and that means more animal suffering. 

Even the confirmation that WTO rules need not be an impediment to stronger animal protection laws may not change very much on the ground.  Governments don’t seem to have much trouble finding other reasons not to act to protect animal welfare, especially when there are competing business or other human interests.  On the other hand, there are some signs that governments may be willing to go further on some animal protection policies now that they no longer face the same uncertainties about running into WTO problems.  For example, Canada recently enacted a ban on the import and export of shark fins – the first G20 country to do so.

It’s possible that more evolution towards international agreement and collaboration on protecting animals could come from international trade law – but trade law outside the WTO itself. There is a huge number of non-WTO trade agreements, from bilateral deals between two trading partners to vast trading blocs that cover multiple countries and large portions of the global market, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (now the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership or CPTPP).  An important feature of these more modern trade agreements is the inclusion of positivecommitments on non-trade matters (such as labour rights and environmental protections) that are connected to membership in the trading relationship.  In other words – if you want to be part of this trade deal, you also have to promise to live up to these standards on labour, the environment, etc. 

That “etc.” could include animal welfare.  In fact, in some bilateral agreements between the EU and other trade partners (including Chile, South Korea and Mexico), it already does.  Those deals have fairly weak language about developing mutually agreed standards on animal welfare and having consultations on animal welfare concerns, limited to matters that have to do with trade covered by the agreement.  All the same, these are international treaties that do expressly deal with animal welfare.  Scholars and activists have been advocating for an animal welfare treaty for all these years, and in a limited and nascent form such treaties do already exist.

The bigger multi-party trade agreements do not address animal welfare.  They do, however, routinely include entire chapters on environmental commitments, which includes the protection of animals to some extent.  An especially interesting feature of these provisions is that they create mechanisms for public participation.  In practical terms, this means that NGOs and even private citizens can request information and make submissions if their own governments are failing to live up to the environmental commitments under the treaty.

These mechanisms can be used to help protect animals.  In fact, they have been. Public participation provisions under a regional trade agreement called CAFTA-DR were used by Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the US in 2007 to address illegal killing of endangered sea turtles in the Dominican Republic, a party to the trade deal. Trade-related provisions like these could potentially become a starting point for generating collaborative international approaches to protecting animals, based on shared values and linked to enforceable obligations. In fact, it’s not far-fetched to imagine a multilateral treaty on animal welfare actually appearing in positive international law someday, in the form of a chapter appended to an international trade agreement.  International trade law may seem like an unlikely incubator of global animal law.  But perhaps this will indeed be where international animal welfare law starts to get a foothold in positive law and real-world action.


Animal Welfare and International Trade Law by Katie Sykes, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Thompson Rivers University, Canada is out now.

Read chapter 1 free on Elgaronline

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Book review: Fundamental Rights Protection Online: The Future Regulation of Intermediaries (Cheltenham UK, Northampton MA USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020)

January 25, 2021

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By Juncal Montero Regules

Fundamental Rights Protection Online: The Future Regulation of Intermediaries; edited by Bilyana Petkova and Tuomas Ojanen

How is the law shaping online speech? Which roles and responsibilities do internet intermediaries have towards fundamental rights in the current regulatory regimes? Will those roles and responsibilities, together with today’s technical infrastructure, lead to an actual democratisation of knowledge spurring a possible decrease in social inequalities? Is the marketplace of ideas giving rise to the proliferation of disinformation and lead to new forms of censorship? Can it inflict grave harm to free speech? These are some of the questions addressed in the book Fundamental rights protection online. The future regulation of intermediaries, an essay collection which brings together outstanding academics exploring the current state-of-the-art of online speech regulation through the prism of fundamental rights. The challenges that the internet poses to fundamental rights are discussed taking internet intermediaries as the subject study. Different legal perspectives, rich analyses and expert contributions shape a timely book with relevant content for policymakers, students, legal practitioners and academics interested in internet law, information law and human rights.

The essay collection reflects upon whether and how to regulate online content, focusing on fundamental rights protection, and specifically on freedom of expression. This objective passes necessarily through intermediaries and through what the editors of the book call “speech curation”, referring to a public and private curation of speech that goes beyond the traditional and binary dynamics of terms such as “regulation” and “moderation”. In this sense, the book is anchored in the idea of internet governance, understood as a multi-level decision-making system whose actors are the public and private sector – an internet governed, and not (only) legislated, regulated or moderated, both by states and private corporations. The spine of the book is freedom of expression, and therefore democracy as an ultimate value. The essays depict the landscape of the regulation of intermediaries from a fundamental rights perspective; they also conceptualise, contextualise and assess the hot spots, thus unfolding the debate. To this end, part I theorises conceptual issues of intermediary regulation, while the remainder of the book focuses on national, European and international approaches regulating intermediaries.

In part I, the vital role of courts and judicial framing in protecting fundamental rights online is put on the table, as well as some of the reasons behind the transatlantic divide, introducing the idea, which underlies all essays and the book itself, that states are to get involved in internet governance. Another fundamental concept for online content curation is presented in the second chapter, namely, the filter bubble and its impact on human rights. The concept of filter bubble introduces the conceptual issue of freedom of expression operating within a digital environment which mainly works through personalisation and, thus, through biased systems. The first part of the book thus serves as a conceptual starting point to the rest of essays, as well as a point of reference to each of them, framing the debate on internet intermediaries and their regulation. Part II of the book discusses content moderation practices in France, Germany, Italy and the United States through the examination of the German Network Enforcement Act, the French law on fake news, the Italian courts’ inconsistent take on the status of intermediaries, and the American approach to content curation. Part III delves into the European legal landscape: one chapter explores the hybrid role of intermediaries and on how the EU intermediary regime should evolve; another chapter addresses and critically assesses the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) shaping the legal regime of intermediaries; one other chapter discusses the EU soft-law measures related to intermediaries concerning disinformation and hate speech; the last chapter of this part on the Copyright Directive focuses on the compatibility of its Article 13 with the CJEU’s jurisprudence. In the fourth and final part, the international law landscape is presented through the  European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) interpretation of the liability regime of intermediaries and its freedom of expression implications, with a final chapter discussing intermediaries from the perspective of business and human rights. A heterogeneous landscape is presented here, with sometimes contradicting approaches and unclear provisions, but whose multi-level regulatory approaches, new legislative developments, and recent proposals sketch interesting dynamics and dialogues which are shaping the protection of fundamental rights online.

The ultimate objective of this work is to contribute to the normative question of the role of law in protecting fundamental rights online. The analysis carried out in the chapters is focused on the regulation of intermediaries through public law. The role of intermediaries is not analysed independently – their role and responsibilities are assessed within the context of national, supranational and international legislation. Intermediaries are, however, active in content curation, as acknowledged throughout the collection of essays. Examining the protection of fundamental rights online without considering intermediaries’ actions per se portrays a somehow incomplete picture, where private regulations shaping online content and affecting freedom of expression are not fully assessed—intermediaries police content through numerous and diverse methods, including the implementation of enforcement measures. The development of the Facebook Oversight Board and the implementation of fact-checking labels in Twitter are some late developments which exemplify the capabilities of intermediaries to shape online content, impacting free speech. By focusing exclusively on public law’s protection of fundamental rights online, this collection of essays is incomplete when it comes to discussing the state-of-the-art of freedom of expression and intermediaries on the Internet. Including all aspects of this field in one work would, however, be overly ambitious. Fundamental rights protection online puts a necessary building block for the construction of a complete assessment of the protection of free speech and fundamental rights online. The book is to be considered within the bigger picture of current and upcoming works on the field, which together will help shape the future of the Internet.

A number of new works on free speech, intermediary and content regulation, which are now seeing the light, contribute to the construction of a complete assessment of the protection of fundamental rights online. This collection of essays complements them and contributes to the debate they articulate. Positive free speech: rationales, methods and implications (Andrew T Kenyon & Andrew Scott, eds.), is premised on the idea of positive free speech as entailing obligations for states to act in support of such freedom, its goals and rationales. One of the ways in which such obligations are extended is “the contemporary communications environment”, understood as the complex communication environment where a myriad of actors and platforms play a role. Such positive free speech obligations in the communication environment are a premise in Fundamental rights protection online: the idea of positive free speech is an implied theoretical basis on which the states’ intervention in online content operates. The legislation aimed at content curation by regulating intermediaries is, in this sense, developing that idea; the legislation analysed in this work can thus be seen as a practical development of positive speech. Positive speech assesses positive speech justifications, potential developments and mechanisms, while Fundamental rights protection online analyses their implementation within online content. The changes taking place worldwide in the fields of intermediaries and free speech are analysed through actual legislation. This analysis complements theoretical multi-disciplinary works on the Internet and free speech such as Free speech in the digital age (Susan J. Brison & Katharine Gelber, eds.), which makes a multi-disciplinary examination of how the new technologies and the global reach of the internet are changing the theory and practice of free speech, mainly from the perspective of American free speech theory. Fundamental rights protection online, in contrast, takes a European viewpoint and looks at free speech online from the specific lens of regulatory developments. The impact of such regulation on freedom of expression is explored from the perspective of each jurisdiction and legislation, and its assessment is focused on intermediaries, leaving out other spheres examined in Free speech in the digital age such as theoretical and conceptual discussions on online free speech, international law regulatory approaches and non-legal issues. In this sense, Fundamental rights protection online can be seen as a European continuation of Free speech in the digital age, focused as it is on the regulation of intermediaries in Europe, and its impact on freedom of expression and content curation.

In any event, the variety of topics that the book covers is remarkable. Overall, the work provides detailed and insightful reading for those interested in the regulation of intermediaries and the situation of fundamental rights online, especially freedom of expression. It paves the way for a necessary in-depth debate on the articulation of the protection of human rights online. The essays included in the book make a novel contribution to the existing literature on internet regulatory problems, mostly because of the contributors’ detailed, in-depth and varied analysis of national, supranational and international attempts legislating online speech curation. They clearly illustrate how the law has been unsettled on treating intermediaries and contextualises freedom of expression online, its challenges and the issues derived from its protection. As a whole, Fundamental rights protection online. The future regulation of intermediaries makes a significant contribution to our understanding of online content curation, fundamental rights and freedom of expression, especially, but not only, in Europe.


Juncal Montero Regules is a PhD Fellow of Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Faculty of Law, Hasselt University, Belgium.

Suggested citation: Juncal Montero Regules, ‘Fundamental rights protection online. The future regulation of intermediaries’ IACL-AIDC Blog (17 December 2020) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/book-reviews/2020/12/17/book-review-fundamental-rights-protection-online-the-future-regulation-of-intermediaries


Fundamental Rights Protection Online Jacket

Fundamental Rights Protection Online: The Future Regulation of Intermediaries, Edited by Bilyana Petkova, University of Graz, Austria and Yale Information Society Project and the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology, US and Tuomas Ojanen, University of Helsinki, Finland is out now.

Read Chapter 1 for free on Elgaronline.

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