The growing movement for the rights of whales: implications for Tonga as a potential first mover

Michelle Bender and Naima Taafaki-Fifita, Ocean Vision Legal

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Key words: Whale Rights, Legal Personhood, Whales, Ocean Rights, Rights of Nature

This blog explores the growing global movement to recognise whales as rights-bearing beings and examines what this emerging legal and ethical framework could mean for Tonga as a potential Pacific leader in whale protection.

Why Whales?

Whales have long occupied a paradoxical place in human history: revered by modern society, in myth and culture, yet relentlessly hunted to the brink of collapse. Today, science has revealed what many coastal and Indigenous communities have understood for centuries. Whales are not only highly intelligent, sentient beings with complex social bonds and culturally transmitted behaviours, but also essential architects of Ocean health and planetary stability. 

Great whales function as keystone species by cycling nutrients throughout the Ocean and enhancing phytoplankton growth through the “whale pump,” a process that supports marine food webs and helps absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide. Each great whale is estimated to sequester roughly 33 tons of carbon over its lifetime. This is comparable to the carbon capture capacity of 30,000 trees! 

Yet despite their immense environmental and intrinsic value, industrial whaling in the twentieth century killed an estimated 2.9 million whales worldwide, driving numerous species, including blue whales, humpbacks, and right whales, to near extinction. International concern over the decimation of whale populations culminated in the International Whaling Commission’s landmark 1982 vote to impose a global moratorium on commercial whaling, which entered into force in 1986. Even so, ongoing whaling by a handful of States, combined with modern threats such as ship strikes, entanglement, pollution, underwater noise, and climate change, continues to challenge global efforts to secure a future for these extraordinary beings and the ecosystems they sustain.

Orca in Norway, Jens Wilkstrom, Ocean Image Bank

The Rights of Whales

In this context, the recognition of whales as rights-bearing beings has emerged as a prominent strand within the Ocean Rights movement. (For more on what rights of whales mean in practice, visit our first blog on this matter here.)

These initiatives include:

• In 2010, a citizens' Declaration for Rights for Cetaceans at a Conference in Helsinki, Finland, asserted that whales and dolphins possess fundamental rights to life, liberty, and wellbeing. 

• In the United States, multiple municipalities have passed non-binding resolutions recognising the rights of whales and dolphins to swim freely, including Malibu and San Francisco. Similarly, an ongoing campaign in Washington State for the critically endangered Southern Resident Orcas has resulted in eight local city and county-level proclamations calling for the State to legally recognise and protect their rights.

• In 2024, Sedna the Harbour Porpoise was appointed as a board member by the Dutch Rugvin Foundation, enabling the representation of the harbour porpoise and broader marine environment in the Foundation’s decision-making.

• And in late 2025, a coalition of organisations filed a groundbreaking lawsuit on behalf of the whales of the Gulf of California, asserting them as deserving of legal protections in their own right.

More recently, the Pacific has emerged as a leader in this movement.

Across the Pacific, whales are respected as kin, navigators and guardians of ecological health. Their migrations sustain cultural identity and biodiversity across vast stretches of Ocean. 

• In 2024, Māori leaders of the Pacific gathered in the Cook Islands and signed the He Whakaputanga Moana (Declaration for the Ocean), a global call for legal personhood for whales. 

• Alongside UNOC3 in 2025, the Moananui Sanctuary Initiative was launched to recognise whales as legal persons and establish a regional sanctuary framework to safeguard their lives and migratory routes across the Pacific. The initiative generated substantial international attention, with over 445,000 signatures calling for Pacific leaders to support this groundbreaking effort. 

• In 2026, drawing inspiration from He Whakaputanga Moana, MP Teanau Tuiono submitted a member’s bill titledTohorā Oranga Bill in parliament, seeking to recognise the rights of whales in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. 

All these examples, and more, can be found on Ocean Vision Legal’s policy tracker at www.oceanrights.com. 

Indigenous leaders from Aotearoa, Cook Islands, Tonga, Tahiti, Hawaii, and Rapanui for the signing of the He Whakaputanga Moana.

(Linda Bercusson via Conservation International Pacific Islands)

Tonga: Its emergence as a leader and its implications

At the Moananui Summit held alongside UNOC3, former Parliament member and now Prime Minister of Tonga, Lord Fatafehi Fakafanua, shared how whale personhood aligns with their cultural responsibility, expressing support for this endeavor. Further, Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho announced Tonga’s commitment to advance this legal innovation for whales, honouring community voices and ancestral views of the tohorā. Lord Fakafanua reinforced this commitment alongside the Melanesian Ocean Summit, pledging support for a whale corridor and the recognition of the rights of whales within Tonga’s National Ocean Policy.

This commitment is deeply significant, as legal rights can help implement Tonga’s national and international commitments specific to whale protection, and Ocean protection broadly, while catalysing a necessary global shift in humanity’s relationship with Nature. These commitments reflect the profound role whales already play within Tonga’s marine ecosystems, cultural identity and economy. 

Humpback whales are central to Tonga’s ecosystems, culture and economy, driving both biodiversity and a million-dollar tourism industry each year. 

Each winter, several hundred humpback whales assemble in the warm coastal waters and shallow banks adjoining the main islands of the Kingdom of Tonga. These waters serve as a primary breeding and calving habitat for the whales during their annual migration between subpolar and tropical regions of the South Pacific. Whale migration also attracts thousands of people from across the globe eager for an encounter of a lifetime with the whales through what’s known as the “lifeblood industry” of Tonga’s economy. Each humpback whale contributes approximately one million U.S. dollars during its 50 to 100-year lifespan, with the whale-watching industry generating almost $2 million annually.

Whales sustain the Ocean, nourish Tongan communities, and carry forward generations of cultural and spiritual traditions. 

Whales are at the heart of Tonga’s marine environment and play an irreplaceable role in sustaining healthy ecosystems. Through their migrations and feeding, whales transport nutrients across vast distances, enriching coastal waters and supporting marine food webs, including fish populations central to subsistence and community wellbeing in Tonga. Beyond their ecological role, whales have long been regarded as sacred beings connected to familial kinship, spiritual protection and intergenerational cultural identity. 

Whale protection is a living, sustainable alternative to deep-sea mining 

Deep-sea mining (DSM) threatens whales directly through habitat disruption, noise pollution, and industrial disturbances, while simultaneously undermining the health of the wider marine ecosystem. Furthermore, findings suggest that Tonga may receive only a marginal share of the total revenues generated by DSM activities in the region. In contrast, investing in whale protection safeguards critical ecological, cultural, and economic functions: 

• Ecological: transport nutrients across the Ocean, support fish populations, enhance coastal productivity and contribute to carbon sequestration; 

• Cultural: preserve Tonga’s heritage, uphold traditional knowledge and values, and maintain sacred relationships with whales; 

• Economic: strengthen subsistence and commercial fisheries and drive sustainable and ethical eco-tourism opportunities. 

Every whale generates long-term ecological, cultural and economic value, far beyond the short-term gains promised by DSM. Prioritising whale protection over extraction is not just conservation, but a strategic choice for Tonga’s resilience, wellbeing and leadership in the Pacific region. 

Humpback Whales in Tonga, Kurt Arrigo, Ocean Image Bank

Next Steps: Community consultation and participation

Alongside emerging legislative efforts recognising whales as legal persons, or more broadly as rights-bearing beings, collaborators have also emphasised the importance of community consultation, storytelling and public education alongside any future legal reforms. The intention is to ensure that legal innovation is supported by a broader social and cultural framework that enables communities to meaningfully shape how whale protection is understood and implemented in their own contexts. 

These conversations have emerged through early discussions between collaborators working across the Moananui Sanctuary Trust, Huelo Matamoana, OVL and movement partners from organisations such as Regenerosity and SIRGE coalition. Participants reflected on the importance of ensuring that any legal recognition of whales is accompanied by community engagement efforts that situate whale protection within the lived realities, values and aspirations of Ocean communities. 

For example, Rachel Steele with Regenerosity expressed that “legal rights” may center why protections are required more closely than 'personhood', noting that “utilising ‘personhood’ can reinforce an anthropocentric bias where humans are centred as most important and whales become worthy of rights because of their proximity to human beings.”

Experience from other Rights of Nature initiatives suggests that legal change alone rarely produces lasting transformation. Many protections remain “paper laws” without sufficient public understanding, implementation or community ownership. Laws are often most effective when they emerge alongside broader movements grounded in cultural legitimacy, shared stewardship and collective participation. For this reason, collaborators suggested that any future whale rights framework should be developed not as an isolated legal reform, but as part of a wider conversation about Ocean stewardship, community decision-making and regenerative Ocean futures. Recognising this, collaborators have also highlighted the need for shared tools and resources to support advocates and communities engaging with these ideas across different contexts. 

OVL is seeking to build a shared global resource for advocates, communities and practitioners working to advance the legal recognition of the rights of whales.

Conclusion

The growing recognition of whales as rights-bearing entities with intrinsic value represents a profound shift in how humanity understands its relationship with the Ocean. For Tonga and the wider Pacific, these developments offer an opportunity to advance a model of Ocean governance rooted not only in conservation, but in respect, reciprocity, and intergenerational responsibility. As global momentum continues to build around the rights of whales, Pacific leadership has the potential to shape international conversations and create enduring protections for some of the Ocean’s most extraordinary beings.

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Ocean Vision Legal is the leading expert in Ocean Rights, and the advancement and implementation of rights for marine species and ecosystems. We have contributed to these global efforts as independent experts, offering robust and unmatched Rights of Nature, Human Rights and Ocean law expertise. We are currently engaging with multiple efforts to recognise the rights of whales, including previous drafting support to the He Whakaputanga Moana, and in Tonga, Germany, Australia, the United States and Mexico. 

Contact us to learn more. 

(Michelle Bender on Legal Personhood of Whales)