Latsis Prize 2025: Saskia Stucki aims to establish animal rights

“I’m engaged in questions like, what are rights? What qualifies someone or something as a right-holder? And do or should animals have rights?” Saskia Stucki’s studies have contributed to the development of the academic field of animal rights law, connecting it with human rights, climate law and environmental law. For her groundbreaking work, she has been awarded the Latsis Swiss Science Prize 2025. She received the news with great surprise: “When they phoned me, I thought that it was a prank,” she recalls. “This is the official seal of approval for my work and for the legitimacy of the young academic field I am working in”.

While the idea of animal rights dates back to the 19th century, a truly academic approach to the subject emerged only two decades ago. Stucki is a legal scholar, senior lecturer and researcher at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW and the University of Zurich. Her work “is a philosophical and legal theoretical inquiry into fundamental concepts, such as legal subjectivity, legal personhood, and rights,” she says. Combining philosophical reasoning, interdisciplinary analysis and comparative methods, she reveals normative gaps in existing legal regimes, while also constructing new theories. In addition, she addresses practical questions like “how could the law change in the future to include animal rights?” In her studies, she uses a combination of solo research and scholarly collaboration.

Analogy to law governing warfare

Stucki’s doctoral research resulted in a book on fundamental rights for animals, which received many awards and was supported by the SNSF. After her PhD, she continued her work with the SNSF-supported research project “Trilogy on a Legal Theory of Animal Rights”. In one journal article, she addressed the questions of whether animals can, do, and should have legal rights. “Simply put: Since humans and animals both have sentient bodies that can be killed and that can hurt, animals could have rights analogous to human rights,” she explains.

In that same journal article, Stucki introduced the new categories of simple and fundamental rights for animals. Simple animal rights, derived from current animal welfare laws, “protect secondary interests, such as the interest to be killed in a painless manner.” In the current anthropocentric legal framework, “animals don't have rights, and can easily be exploited in the name of human interests, including culinary ones,” notes Stucki. Fundamental animal rights, on the contrary, “are strong rights along the lines of human rights, such as the animal right to life, the animal right to freedom, the right not to be tortured or held in captivity.”

Stucki is not a scholar who is afraid to take on strong debates. In a 2023 milestone paper that drew much attention, she made a novel and elegant analogy between animal welfare law and the law governing warfare, which is international humanitarian law. “Both of these distinct legal fields govern an inherently violent institution, that of war and that of animal exploitation, and both operate with the key principle of unnecessary suffering,” she explains. Through these lenses, and by considering how human rights have contributed to humanising war law, Stucki concludes that animal rights could also positively influence animal welfare law. “Based on this analogy, animal rights and animal welfare can be reframed as complementary and not mutually exclusive legal approaches.”

Meat market prices should be twice as high

Stucki’s work has recently expanded into the realms of environmental and health law. Taking her cue from the holistic One Health concept, she developed the One Rights approach in a recently published book. “There I seek to integrate human rights and animal rights under a holistic normative approach,” she says.

Within the One Health approach, the legal scholar is now researching food governance and meat production as a paradigmatic practical case. “The food system is a very good example of how human, animal, and environmental health are interconnected, because it is extremely unhealthy, unsustainable and produces immeasurable amounts of animal suffering,” she says, herself a vegan for 20 years. There are manifold measures that governments could implement to transform the food system. Switzerland, for example, would need to at least double meat market prices “to internalise all the costs, including subsidies, human health, animal welfare and environmental impacts.”

As her research has evolved in the past few years, so has legislation around the world, with some courts issuing judgments that consider animals as right-holders. “When I started my scholarship 15 years ago, the idea of legal animal rights was completely utopian to me. So, I was really surprised when, over the last decade, legal animal rights have started to be recognised, not in Switzerland or Europe, but in South America and Asia.” For example, in 2011 and 2015, Indian courts ruled that birds had the right to fly freely and not to be locked in cages. And, in Ecuador, the rights of nature are even recognised in the constitution.

Animal rights theory is still understudied

These new legal developments also led Stucki to change how she tackles her research on animal rights theory, taking it from a deductive to an inductive approach. “I am now examining real legal practices and the diverse reasons for recognising animal rights. Based on those practices, I theorise real animal rights as a new phenomenon.” She invites her fellow scholars to reconsider the use of deductive reasoning in animal rights theory, as she has done, because it “may be out of touch with the current animal rights practice on the ground.” And how does she keep herself grounded while pursuing her passion for research? “Also in a very practical manner,” she says laughing, “by sharing my home with a ‘very hairy’ rescue dog.”

Saskia Stucki aims to continue focusing on holistic approaches to animal rights theory at the new Center for Animal Rights and the Environment (CARE), which she is currently establishing at ZHAW. There she will build her own group and continue expanding her research into different areas, because “animal rights theory is still so understudied that there's plenty of niches and free space for original, groundbreaking research.”