Committees established for the ethical review of research involving animals have become a widespread legal standard around the world. Despite many differences in their composition, powers, and institutional settings, they share many common problems related to the well-established standards of procedural justice in administrative practice. The paper adapts the general theory of procedural justice to the specific context of ethical review committees. From this perspective, the main concerns over the procedural aspects of the ethical evaluation of research projects are identified (...) and examined. They include in particular the standards of the committees’ composition, impartiality, fair hearing, appeal, transparency, and benevolence. Their proper reflection in the regulatory regimes of animal ethics committees is necessary to secure the standards of fairness of the ethical review itself. This, in turn, is a condition of the moral and social legitimacy of all administrative and quasi-administrative procedures, including the committees’ operations. (shrink)

The concept of vulnerability is deployed in bioethics to, amongst other things, identify and remedy harms to participants in research, yet although nonhuman animals in experimentation seem intuitively to be vulnerable, this concept and its attendant protections are rarely applied to research animals. I want to argue, however, that this concept is applicable to nonhuman animals and that a new taxonomy of vulnerability developed in the context of human bioethics can be applied to research animals. This taxonomy does useful explanatory (...) work, helping to pinpoint the limitations of the 3Rs/welfare approach currently adopted in the context of animal experimentation. On this account, the 3Rs/welfare approach fails to deliver for nonhuman animals in experimentation because it effectively addresses only one element of their vulnerability (inherent) and paradoxically through the institution of Animal Ethics Committees intended to protect experimental animals in fact generates new vulnerabilities that exacerbate their already precarious situation. (shrink)