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Consultation Paper on Openness and Animal Procedures Response by Animal Aid This is the response by Animal Aid to the Consultation Paper on Openness and Animal Procedures by the Animal Procedures Committee of the Home Office. It is vital that people opposed to vivisection use this opportunity to make the case that animal experimentation is morally and scientifically wrong. We can provide information, on request, to support this and also give suggestions of points to raise. 1. That animal experiments inflict enormous physical and emotional suffering on a large number of animals is indisputable. The government itself acknowledges this fact in the way it frames the regulations and grades the levels of pain involved. 2. Animal experiments, a wealth of evidence demonstrates, are also scientifically invalid, in that the data generated from them cannot be reliably applied to the field of human medicine, toxicology or disease research. 3. Invasive experiments that are conducted on one group of animals, supposedly to produce benefits for animals of the same species, are also scientifically unreliable. This is because of the unnatural, stressful, data-gathering environment of the laboratory. Such experiments, in any case, cannot be justified morally. Medical science does not (openly at least) deliberately and systematically injure one group of humans in an attempt to advance the cause of another. The same ethical standard should apply to non-human animals. 4. While some of the above assertions are disputed by various special interest groups, it has to be true that the best way to advance the argument and to ensure that government policy reflects the movement of public opinion, is for there to be maximum openness with respect to animal experiments. 5. It is the government's moral and democratic duty to ensure such openness, rather to than hide behind the familiar excuses for continuing the policy of secrecy. 6. The personal safety of individual researchers is far more likely to be secured within a climate of openness than within one of furtive secrecy. The outgoing Home Office Minister, George Howarth, acknowledged this fact in his concluding remarks at the HO Forum on animal experiments staged in July 1999. 7. Animal Aid regularly searches the scientific literature and publishes examples of typically or unnaturally cruel and worthless animal research. It cannot be right for the names of the individuals, institutions and companies involved to be concealed. Many of these projects are supported by public taxes, or else the public pay for them when they buy the products that are the end result of the experiments. It is the public's right to know what is being done in their name, with their money and by whom. 8. Equally, groups like Animal Aid - enjoying as we do a great deal of support from the general public - require a more complete and timely picture than is currently available of animal experiments in this country. Details of the majority of experiments (especially those conducted by commercial companies) are not published. Nor is there an opportunity to view applications for project licenses submitted to the Home Office. This is a serious deficiency, given the evidence indicating that licenses continue to be granted for animal research that is unduly cruel, frivolous, repetitious in respect to previously conducted research, and/or which presents an unquantifiable public health risk arising from the reckless use of viral and other pathogens; and from the inter-species transfer of DNA sequences. 9. Genuine issues of commercial confidentiality can be comfortably resolved within a climate of maximum openness. At present, companies involved in carrying out or commissioning animal experiments can assert a right to confidentiality, to the detriment of public health, as well as to animal welfare. 10. A decade ago, Smith Kline & French Laboratories (as it then was) brought a judicial review to challenge the right of the licensing authority even to refer to safety information supplied by SKF, when the licensing authority was considering similar product licence applications by other companies. SKF wanted to keep that information secret, despite its obvious relevance to human health. The case went all the way to the House of Lords, where, happily, they lost (R v Licensing Authority ex parte Smith Kline & French Laboratories (Generics (UK) Ltd and another intervening) [1989] 1 All ER 578). 11. The SKF case is symptomatic of a situation generally pertaining. And such tensions between the commercial medical sector and the regulatory agencies (with their clear remit on behalf of the public) are becoming sharper still in this new biotech era in which corporations are claiming ownership of DNA sequences and even of 'novel' animal types. 12. The government's proposed Freedom of Information legislation offers an ideal opportunity to strike away the legal impediments to openness currently enshrined in the 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act and, particularly, in Section 24. 13. Section 24 is an extreme provision by any standards. Not only does it impose a potential two year prison sentence on persons disclosing virtually any information obtained during the 'exercise of [their] functions', but even the Secretary of State is ensnared by the secrecy requirement. Disclosure to parliament - about wrongdoing, for instance - is prohibited, thus making proper ministerial accountability impossible. 14. While the Home Office was recently forced to acknowledge that information submitted by licence holders and licence applicants is not automatically subject to the rule of confidentiality, the HO is treating as confidential any document it receives that is so marked. 15. Inevitably, the pro-vivisection lobby group, the Research Defence Society, is urging 'everyone working under the 1986 Act to take the precaution of marking every document (including applications, letters and statistical returns) sent to the Home Office as "confidential" or "in confidence". (Mark Matfield, RDS executive director, January 1999 edition of RDS News). 16. Even if Section 24 were to be repealed, secrecy would continue under Clause 32 of the Draft Freedom of Information Bill. This Clause ensures that any information given to a public authority in confidence will be exempt from disclosure; nor will there be discretion to disclose on public interest grounds. 17. Clause 25 of the Draft Bill is a further barrier to openness. This Clause exempts from disclosure all information held by public authorities, at any time, relating to investigations not merely into breaches of the law but into 'any other improper conduct'. 18. Such investigations can and do drag on interminably, during the course of which the public would have no right to information that should properly be in the public domain. 19. In summary, animal experiments have for too long been conducted in a climate of secrecy, the justifications for which relate principally to claims for the need for commercial confidentiality and the need to protect the personal safety of individual researchers. Neither of these justifications is plausible. The personal security of researchers would be advanced by a climate of openness, although such a climate would oblige those engaged in animal experiments to seek to convince the general public as to the legitimacy of their activities. 20. The sweeping away of the secrecy enacted for reasons of 'commercial confidentiality' would be beneficial both to the animal victims of laboratory research and to the general public, who require a right of access to information relating to their own health. 21. It is worth reiterating, finally, that the secrecy habit pre-dates any fear of animal rights militancy. In 1965, the government's Littlewood Committee Report on Animal Experiments noted that there had been an '...appearance of secrecy about the practice of animal experimentation' and that Home Office inspectors 'have tended to discourage laboratory authorities from inviting individuals or the Press to enter animal houses'. 22. In 1974, guidance notes compiled by the RDS and the Home Office recommended researchers to 'aim at a closed community in a self-contained unit with private lift or entrance(s) for staff... not overlooked or, if so, fitted with opaque windows... Premises selected and prepared for experimental animal usage should ideally be in a quiet place undisturbed by traffic and out of sight of the general public and afforded minimal publicity.' 23. In other words, the paraphernalia of secrecy is in place not to defend vivisectors from an 'extremist minority' but from the majority of the British public, that majority having declared themselves to be against animal experiments on both moral and scientific grounds.* Andrew Tyler, Director, Animal Aid, January 31 2000 * A May 1999 New Scientist MORI poll revealed that 64 per cent of those questioned oppose vivisection. The level of opposition was confirmed by another MORI poll, published in September 1999 and this time commissioned by Novartis. This showed a 69 per cent disapproval of vivisection. Animal Aid commissioned a poll from Solutions in May 1998, which showed a majority of adults aged 14-35 opposed animal experiments on the grounds that the results could not be reliably applied to people. |
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