Victory! Court Once Again Strikes Blow Against Anonymity for Inept Animal Oversight Committee Members
Update (December 4, 2024): Chalk up another victory for transparency, PETA and the Northwest Animal Rights Network! And it’s a blow to institutions that take taxpayer money to harm animals in experiments but try to shirk their accountability to taxpayers.
A panel of three 9th Circuit judges just issued a landmark decision that ruled that the members of the University of Washington’s animal experimentation oversight committee have no constitutional right to keep their identities secret—as we have been saying all along.
In 2021, PETA had requested the names of the members, who are supposed to be the last line of protection for animals imprisoned in the school’s laboratories. This committee, known as the IACUC, has consistently been a miserable failure at its job, resulting in animals’ deaths from irradiation, starvation, dehydration, strangulation, scalding, blood loss, and other causes.
Who sits on these committees in publicly funded institutions and what they do is everyone’s business, and these individuals cannot simply choose to operate in secrecy. As PETA explained to the 9th Circuit, access to member identities is vital in allowing the public to investigate serious concerns about potentially illegal conflicts of interest. This is vital because, if the oversight body is improperly constituted, it is operating illegally and should have no authority to approve experiments on animals.
This marks the third time in three years that a lower court decision absolving the school from disclosing these names has been reversed. Despite UW IACUC members’ desperate attempts to conceal their identities–which has prevented scrutiny of whether they are qualified to oversee the use of animals in experiments–the 9th Circuit Court has once again made it clear that they have no right to hide this information.
The case now goes back to the district court, where PETA will continue to oppose any further efforts by the committee members to use the legal process to evade basic public oversight of their work as members of a governing body of an important state agency.
Originally posted on October 1, 2021:
PETA is filing a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the University of Washington (UW) over its refusal to disclose exactly who is on its ironically named Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)—the group that is supposed to ensure that all animal protection laws are enforced in the school’s laboratories but has failed miserably to prevent animals’ deaths from starvation, dehydration, strangulation, scalding, blood loss, and other causes.
The state of Washington’s Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) requires that all meetings of governing bodies of publicly funded agencies be open to the public. The IACUC—which meets the description of a governing body under the OPMA—is currently conducting much of its actions outside of public view.
When the members do show their faces, it’s in brief monthly meetings via Zoom web calls with their names hidden. Instead, participants use anonymous labels such as “IACUC1” or “IACUC2,” and even these placeholder names are subject to change from one meeting to the next.
Our groundbreaking lawsuit asks the court to order the disclosure of these IACUC members’ names and to set aside any actions taken by the committee that violate OPMA. If PETA is successful, actions taken by the IACUC—including the approval of experiments—in violation of the law may be deemed null and void and any such experiments may need to be reviewed again properly.
UW Has Some Explaining to Do
The IACUC is meant to be the last line of defense for animals suffering in laboratories, responsible for ensuring that animal protection laws and regulations are adhered to—yet we don’t even know whether its members are qualified to hold their positions so long as UW suspiciously conceals their identities.
Under the provisions of the federal Animal Welfare Act, IACUCs are required to have a certain makeup of members, including a nonscientist and a community member representing the general community’s interests in the treatment of animals. But the UW IACUC’s “nonscientific” member is Ken Gordon, the executive director of the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research, which promotes experiments on animals.
The membership of its IACUC isn’t the only thing that UW is trying to hide.
In December 2020, PETA filed a lawsuit against the school for its failure to release documents detailing the decision to purchase a rundown, contaminated facility in the Arizona desert where UW’s primate center has been breeding macaques for use in experiments. The school has also failed to turn over documents detailing the primate center’s financial and leadership crises.
UW’s IACUC Members Have Repeatedly Let Animals Down
UW’s IACUC has a shameful track record. In 2015, inspectors found that it was acting as a rubber stamp committee—recklessly approving even proposals that hadn’t been filled out properly. Documents revealed that multiple procedures had been approved by the IACUC without adequately detailing what would be done to the animals. This led to the suffering of three monkeys who were used in surgeries, later suffered from “significant health issues” following experiments, and were killed.
After PETA released the first-ever footage shot inside UW’s Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC), which revealed isolated monkeys pacing inside cramped, barren cages, we reviewed public records that further exposed the cruelty in the school’s laboratories.
Between November 2017 and March 2021, 77 incidents were documented in which animals at UW sustained serious injuries or died—nearly two per month. As we said, shameful. Oh, and did we mention that the chair of the IACUC is a liar?
Help PETA Hold UW Accountable—Call For an End to Archaic Experiments on Monkeys!
UW’s experiments are largely funded by taxpayer dollars, so at the very least, the school owes the public full transparency. But that won’t be enough to stop animals from suffering in its laboratories. Join PETA in calling for UW’s president to pull the plug on the WaNPRC:
