Germany court case: seals in the North Sea (1988)

Summary

In 1988, for the first time, “seals in the North Sea” sued the Federal Republic of Germany in the administrative court of Hamburg over permitting commercial enterprises to dump or burn waste materials into the high seas. The seals’ “existential need to survive” was the starting point for the lawsuit: because it is “about the continued existence of an entire animal species” – almost 80 percent of the seal population in Schleswig-Holstein has already been extinct – “people’s livelihoods” are also affected.

Upon discovering dead seals in the North Sea, a group of students in Hamburg demanded that Bonn’s Environment Minister Klaus Töpfer (CDU) take action to defend the seals of the North Sea from the pollution caused by dumping of toxic waste from companies and shipping. Over 300,000 tons of chemical waste are burned and dumped every year by major companies. Seals are among the marine mammals most heavily contaminated with toxic PCBs in the world. The students wrote to the minister, “the sea is sending an SOS” and “seals, after all, they can’t defend themselves.”

On September 22, 1988, the judge of the administrative court of Hamburg dismissed the case because North Sea seals lacked standing. In the German legal system “only natural persons [people] are able to participate” in the court of law. The ruling states that “The animal is therefore still a thing in the sense of civil and administrative law; it is not somehow elevated to legal personality.” As wild animals, seals are also “not subject to the legal system of the Federal Republic of Germany” because they live in the “coastal sea or outside the sovereign borders.”