The cetacean right to life revisited

Abstract

Many cetaceans are borderline persons and, as such, have a right to life. This is partly a normative and partly a positive legal claim. While many philosophers agree that cetaceans possess limited moral rights, it can also be shown that most states already behave as though they possess limited legal rights. The most basic of these, the right to life, reflects shifting contemporary normsespecially given scientific evidence as to cetacean sentience, intelligence and autonomyand the consolidation of customary international law. The recent decision of the International Court of Justice in Whaling in the Antarctic (2014) includes important obiter dicta to this effect and arguably suggests an avenue for future doctrinal development in this area. Nevertheless, while the cetacean right to life already exists, there are a number of obstacles that preclude its enforcement. Perhaps the most significant of these remain the traditional status of the world's oceans as a global commons and the weak sovereignty of international law.

Appropriate Targets

“…Th e death threats, physical assaults, and racist verbal abuse leading up to and during the single legalized Makah hunt in 1999 can be categorized similarly (Reid 2015). Ultimately, building on Kalland, Einarsson, and others, I argue that sovereignty becomes less and less important for anti-whaling groups and the public in the general discourse about cetacean hunting, as cetaceans move closer to human or "near-person" status (Mence 2015). In the extremis of this position, hunters become murderers and violations of sovereignty become acceptable to prevent the death of human-adjacent beings.…”

“…While there is some debate about global models of cetacean stocks, according to the IWC's scientifi c advisory body, the need for the total moratorium from a conservation perspective has ended, as some cetacean species have recovered to a degree that would allow for some level of hunting to resume (Kalland 1993(Kalland , 2009. Th e IWC's inability to act on its own data, as well as external scientifi c research, has led some scholars to conclude that the commission has now moved away from the original resource management mandate and toward a conservation mandate underpinned by evolving ethical norms related to a growing consensus on the exceptional status of cetaceans (Bradford 2000;Coté 2010;Einarsson 1993;Kalland 2009;Mence 2015).…”

Integrating First Nations peoples' cultural capital for sustainable development

“…However, efforts to stop such practices have met with limited success because the world's oceans are common property and international law has weak sovereignty (supreme authority) in enforcing bowhead whales' right to life (Mence, 2015). In addition, First Nations peoples have pointed out that the statistics reported about such killings are overestimated, and there is also statistical evidence that such killings have substantially decreased over the decades (Singleton & Fielding, 2017).…”

Reimagining sustainable fisheries

“…Yet, whale populations continued to decline. Throughout the 1970s, there was highly visible science, activism, popular media coverage, tightening of national regulations, and international proposals related to anti-whaling, which led to an international moratorium on whaling being first articulated at the 1972 Stockholm Environment Conference [ 11 ].…”

“…At the 1982 meeting of the IWC, Holt argued it would be “a great evil to destroy something we don’t understand” [ 13 ]. That year, member states voted to adopt a moratorium on whaling, which phased out commercial whaling by 1986 [ 11 ].…”