This article is part of our special report Animal protection – in Europe and beyond.
It is fitting that the European Commission periodically reviews legislation to ensure that it is still delivering on its objectives in a cost-effective way. Sometimes, however, a ‘REFIT’ risks poking a hornets’ nest.
Dr Joanna Swabe is senior director of public affairs at Humane Society International/Europe.
That is the case with Regulation (EC) No 1007/2009 on trade in seal products. This landmark legislation resulted from a lengthy, hard-fought political struggle, which pitched advocates for defenceless animals against a niche industry backed by several foreign governments and other interests.
Europe was once the largest market for seal products, but as citizens became increasingly aware of the inherent cruelty involved in commercial sealing during the 1970s, the pressure grew to close our borders to these products.
This culminated in the adoption of the Seal Pups Directive in 1983, banning imports of the skins and derived products from newborn pups of harp seals (whitecoats) and hooded seal pups under a year of age (bluebacks) that had been commercially slaughtered.
Its key market closed, the industry significantly declined. Hundreds of thousands of sentient beings were spared a horrific death and the debate over sealing quietened down for several years.
Until, that is, the Northwest Atlantic cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s, and Canadian officials scapegoated seals to avoid taking responsibility for their mismanagement of the fishery. With false claims that seals had harmed fish stocks, Canada introduced massive subsidies and kill quotas to resuscitate sealing. The sealers turned their attention from newborn harp seals to those who – a mere couple of weeks later – had shed their neonatal whitecoats and whose pelts no longer fell under the terms of the EEC Directive.
With Canada setting its total allowable catches for up to 400,000 seals per annum, its commercial seal hunt fast became the world’s biggest marine mammal slaughter, and the industry again set its sights on the European market.
Almost back to square one, the campaign to ban commercial seal products in the EU resumed. But now, the slaughter had become larger and even more cruel.
In 2005, I observed the brutal butchery out on the ice floes of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Not even the few minimum standards the Canadian authorities had introduced to prescribe methods of killing seals were adhered to. I witnessed seals, barely three weeks old, being clubbed, and watched the sealers start to skin them without checking whether the animals were dead or even unconscious.
In 2008, the European Commission delivered a legislative proposal – demanded by a majority of MEPs and millions of EU citizens – to close the Union’s borders to the products of commercial sealing. A greatly strengthened version of this proposal was adopted in May 2009.
Unfortunately, but predictably, the EU seal product trade ban subsequently became the focus of various legal challenges, which – following a case brought by Canada and Norway at the WTO – set an important legal precedent that must not be ignored.
In 2014, the WTO upheld the EU’s right to prohibit trade in commercial seal products for public morality reasons. This was an historic first, and that ruling has significant ramifications for international law and trade policy since it recognises that animal welfare is a justifiable rationale for taking trade restrictive measures.
The WTO’s rulings did determine that two derogations to the EU’s Seal Regime violated WTO principles, requiring minor amendments to the legislation in 2015. Once more, representatives of several nations and various interest groups, such as hunters, commercial sealers and agents of the fur trade, descended on Brussels to try to undermine or rescind the EU ban on commercial seal product trade.
Since that time, the legislation has continued to do exactly what it intended, excluding all commercial seal products from the EU market, and only letting in products with documentation proving that they qualify under the “Inuit and other indigenous communities” exception, or fall under a personal use clause.
Since its entry into force, the 2009 EU seal product trade ban has spared the lives of nearly five million seals in Canada alone as pelt prices have plummeted and most commercial sealers have opted to not participate in the annual slaughter.
Ironically and tragically, the cruelty documented in the commercial seal hunt has increased since the 2009 EU ban as climate change has worsened sea ice conditions. With sea ice rapidly diminishing and breaking up, sealers are now shooting more seals in or near open water, leading to far higher rates of woundings, losses, and live animals impaled on metal hooks and dragged onto boat decks where they are beaten with clubs to render them unconscious.
Moreover, as climate change destroys the habitat of the ice-dependent harp seals, pup mortality rates have risen as high as 100% in key birthing areas. Former government scientists now admit that they may have previously overestimated seal numbers by more than three million animals, suggesting that Canada based its management plans on population studies that were fundamentally flawed.
Given the situation, the Commission’s fitness check of this legislation should be grist to the mill. Notwithstanding, commercial sealing advocates and others are lining up to seize this opportunity to lobby once more for repeal of the EU seal product trade ban.
All of this fills me with a dreaded sense of déjà vu and an urgent impulse to remind the Commission that the rules pertaining to seal product imports are very much still fit for purpose. The EU ban has prevented an increase in killing levels and spared a great deal of cruelty.
Canada has a clear cynical intention to undermine the ban and resume market access for its cruel products. We should not let that happen. The Commission should maintain this legislation unchanged, not only because commercial sealing poses an existential threat to seal populations vulnerable to climate change, but also – as the WTO recognised – that it is in every respect an affront to public morality.