Will Whales Finally Get Their Day in Court?
Whale Protection Team Ekō <us@eko.org>
(June 16, 2026) —His song can travel an entire ocean.
Whales carry an extraordinary library of songs about migration routes, feeding grounds, and even relationships. While we humans write, they pass songs through generations.
That is, often, until a harpoon, a plastic net, or a ship turbine silences them — a killing cycle that brutally ends the lives of thousands of whales and calves each year. So Pacific Indigenous leaders have come up with a radical new plan to protect whales.And governments are listening.
Tonga is now poised to become the first country in the world to pass a law recognising whales as legal persons – with matching rights.
But this political window is fragile.
Tonga has a brand-new parliament, and whales urgently need champions in the government. If we raise enough, community leaders could finally run consultations across the country: experts say documented public support is exactly how this law will get passed.
Support for whale personhood has been swelling across the Pacific. If this bill succeeds, other nations will follow suit – and legal protections for whales could ripple across nearly half of Earth’s entire ocean.
For the first time, whales could be represented in court. Anyone could sue on their behalf. Will you help make Tonga the place the world changed its mind about whales?
This could protect them from the things that are killing them: deep-sea mining, bottom trawling, plastic pollution, ship strikes, naval sonar. Anything that violates their right to migrate, to feed, to live in their pods, to exist in a healthy ocean becomes legally actionable.
Existing law treats whales as property and resources… Personhood flips that.
Whoever sues no longer needs to prove direct human harm – now the industries causing the harm will have to prove they aren’t violating the whales’ rights.
If you think this sounds radical: some corporations already have legal personhood. They can sue, own property, sign contracts. That legal trick reshaped the world economy.
Whale personhood is the same kind of precedent-setting move – but for the living ocean.
Will you help these lawyers make sure it lands, and fuel all Eko’s campaigns for the natural world?
https://action.eko.org/a/let-s-be-the-first-to-win-rights-for-whales
Thanks for all that you do,
Camille and the team at Ekō
| More information:
Tonga Poised to Be the First Country to Recognize Rights of Whales – Inside Climate News New Zealand Tohorā Oranga Bill: legal personhood of whales |
Ekō is a worldwide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy.
