The roots of the Helsinki Animal Law Centre are in the ANIWERE project. ANIWERE (2019–2024) is a research project that investigated the foundations and general principles of animal law. The particular focus of the ANIWERE project was on analyzing what is termed the Welfarist Regime of Animal Law, which is dominant in Western legal systems. In the Welfarist Regime – named after the animal welfare acts in place in various jurisdictions – animals are treated as property but are protected from “unnecessary suffering” and/or “animal cruelty”. Practices such as rearing animals for food or using them in research aren’t thus prohibited under the Welfarist Regime; they are merely regulated. Combining doctrinal study of law, legal philosophy and rhetorical criticism, the project produced a legal theory of the Welfarist Regime and in so doing improved our understanding of the current state of animal law in Finland and other Western countries whose legislations are built on the Welfarist ethos.
The project, directed by Dr
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The project scrutinizes legal agency in the contemporary context through three thematic analyses of agency: individual human agency, animal agency, and artificial and group agency.
The subproject focusing on animal agency investigates the notion of animal agency, seeking to combine the recent philosophical ideas and the sparse existing legal work to produce a comprehensive and rigorous account of what the legal recognition of animal agency could mean.
HUMAN-Bio is a multidisciplinary project aiming to develop and validate next-generation non-animal approaches to animal testing. The project introduces a new approach to biomedical innovation in which technological, ethical and legal developments are designed to evolve in parallel.
WP2 (Enabling frameworks and legal roadmap), led by Prof. Visa Kurki, maps the legal and regulatory terrain that non-animal methods have to cross. The work package identifies what genuinely slows the adoption of human-based models, distinguishing hard legal constraints from soft ones and from merely apparent, superficial obstacles that persist out of habit or caution. Alongside this, the work package addresses the questions that human-derived models raise on their own account, including how consent, ownership and benefit-sharing should operate when patient-derived tissue becomes a complex and potentially commercial system.