FW:Japanese call for more bite in animal rules

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Japanese legislation under attack

 

Nature. 2 March 2005

doi:10.1038/434006a

Japanese call for more bite in animal rules.

Activists battle researchers over upcoming

animal-welfare law.

By David Cyranoski

 

Tokyo - Animal-welfare activists are locking horns

with

researchers in Japan over how strictly the use of

animals in the country's labs should be controlled.

 

Friction has built up because the Japanese parliament

is preparing an updated version of the 1973

animal-welfare law, which is expected to pass by June

(see Nature 430, 714; 2004). Animal-welfare

campaigners want to introduce legally binding

restrictions on experiments, but researchers advocate

voluntary guidelines instead.

 

Mounting public concern has put pressure on parliament

to strengthen legislation. The current system is based

on " guesswork " about what is happening in

laboratories, Seichi Kaneda, a member of the main

opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, told

a hearing in Tokyo on 24 February.

 

At the moment, general guidelines are enforced by the

environment ministry on the basis of the 1973 law. But

ethical questions relating to specific experiments,

such as whether animals need to be used in the way

proposed by the researchers, are dealt with by the

ministries funding the research.

 

Researchers acknowledge that the system could be

improved. A representative of the Science Council of

Japan (SCJ), a coalition of scientific societies, told

the hearing that Japan has a reputation " as an outlaw

country without rules " . The representative, a

neuroscientist who asked not to be identified for fear

of harassment by animal-welfare groups, said that

Japan should implement voluntary guidelines that would

cover industrial as well as academic labs.

 

The guidelines proposed by the SCJ would require

institutions to set up committees to monitor animal

experiments. They would also call for greater use of

third-party accreditation of labs by bodies such as

the US-based Association for Assessment and

Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International.

The SCJ says that if these guidelines were in place,

there would be no need for legally binding regulation

of animal experiments, which it claims might be

implemented arbitrarily by local government officials.

 

But animal-rights groups, such as All Life in a Viable

Environment (ALIVE), say that self-regulation by

researchers is not enough. A survey carried out by

ALIVE last September showed that most university

medical departments don't even keep track of the

number of animals used. " They just want to avoid any

kind of accountability, " says ALIVE director Fusako

Nogami.

 

The revised law should at least contain a registration

system that requires experimental facilities or

researchers to inform a government authority that an

experiment will be carried out, says Nogami. Most

other countries have much stricter regulations.

 

Britain requires labs to be licensed if they do animal

experiments. The United States combines legal measures

(including unannounced visits that can result in

fines) with voluntary guidelines.

 

Japan's Democratic party hopes that negotiations with

members of the ruling coalition will produce a more

restrictive draft of the law. Momentum for reform is

apparently strong, although the civil service and the

powerful Liberal Democratic party seem to be less

enthusiastic about such restrictions.