Proceedings before Giessen Administrative Court
In a 2003 ruling the Giessen Administrative Court argued that the authorities now had a material right of review following the adoption of animal protection as a constitutional goal through the amendment of Art. 20a Basic Law.
Giessen Administrative Court, ruling of 13 August 2003, ref. no.: 10 E 1409/03 Online Version
A researcher took legal action after an animal experiment that he had applied to carry out was rejected by the competent approval agency. The planned experiment was to investigate the weight gain of rats following administering of the antipsychotic drug Clozapin.
The agency had refused to give its approval with the justification that the planned animal experiment was neither indispensable nor ethically acceptable (as defined by § 7 Animal Protection Act). The plaintiff, on the other hand, was of the opinion that the approval agency was not authorised to arrive at such an assessment, but was merely - within the meaning of a qualified plausibility check - tasked with reviewing whether the researcher had provided scientific justification for his project. Since this had occurred in the case at hand, it was obliged to grant him the appropriate approval.
The court decided against the plaintiff and found that the approval agency had a material right of review and, in particular, was empowered to subject the scientific justification provided by the researcher to objective scrutiny. This power derived inter alia from the fact that since 2002 animal protection had been a constitutional goal and this would "inevitably" have implications for the provisions of simple law set out in the Animal Protection Act.
It may also be noted that the court confirmed the assessment reached by the approval agency, namely that the experiments for which approval was sought were neither indispensable nor ethically acceptable. The dispute dragged on, until finally in its ruling of June 16, 2004 the Higher Administrative Court of the State of Hesse rejected the plaintiff's application for permission to appeal against this decision.
In the years preceding the adoption of animal protection as a constitutional goal, another judgment of the Giessen Administrative Court was concerned with the question as to the extent to which academic freedom, which is protected by Article 5, § 3, section 1 of German Basic Law, covers the performance of animal experiments in the context of university courses in biology.
Giessen Administrative Court, ruling of 24 August 1995, ref. no.: 7E 1982/94 Online Version
In the procedure in question, a university professor of the Philipps-Universität Marburg successfully brought an action against the official prohibition of one of his courses which included animal experiments. More precisely, the experiment, which was about food absorption in the small intestine of rats, was performed under general anaesthesia and ended with the killing of the laboratory animals. Among other issues, the legal dispute concerned the question of whether the experiment’s purpose could be realised alternatively by utilising tutorial videos. The court decided that this would have been a feasible alternative for conveying factual knowledge on digestion. However, the further goal of teaching the basic know-how of working with laboratory animals could not be reached by tutorial videos. The plaintiff had the right to set the educational goals of his course for students of biology specialising in zoology in this particular way.