Last month, the European Court of Human Rights decided a case, The Executive Committee of Muslims of Belgium and Others v. Belgium, that required balancing religious freedom and animal welfare.
The Belgian provinces of Flanders and Wallonia had passed laws requiring that all animals slaughtered for human consumption must be stunned before being killed. Muslim and Jewish communities sought to overturn the legislation, claiming that it violated their freedom to slaughter animals in the manner prescribed by their dietary laws.
Previous applications to the Belgian Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union were unsuccessful, so the applicants turned to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). All members of the Council of Europe must ratify the European Convention on Human Rights.
According to Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, "Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others."
If animal welfare falls under any of these headings, "public morals" seems the most likely. The applicants argued, however, that the Convention's reference to the protection of "public morals" should be understood as aimed solely at protecting human dignity between individuals. The ECHR had never previously heard a case requiring it to weigh the right to religious freedom against the welfare of animals, so it was not easy to predict how it would decide.
The ECHR's ruling on Feb 13 found that laws requiring prior stunning do restrict the applicants' religious freedom. It also found, however, that protecting the welfare of animals is part of the legitimate government objective of protecting public morals. The notion of "morality," the court said, is evolving, and what is held to be acceptable at one time may cease to be so later.
The ECHR's view is that it should give significant weight to decisions taken by legislatures, especially when they enact laws by large majorities -- and in both provinces, the legislatures were almost unanimous in their support of the legislation in question. The court also noted that the Belgian Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union had both held, in their prior judgments upholding the legislation, that animal welfare, as an ethical value, is of increasing importance in contemporary democratic societies and that this should be taken into account when assessing restrictions on how religious beliefs manifest themselves in actions affecting animal welfare.
The ECHR was not persuaded by the applicants' argument that the Convention limits "public morals" to the protection of human dignity. The court noted previous cases in which the court had paid attention to the protection of animal welfare and also to the environment. Accordingly, the ECHR held: "the Convention cannot be interpreted as promoting the absolute upholding of the rights and freedoms it enshrines without regard to animal suffering".
To judge that the laws were not an unreasonable restriction of freedom of religion, the court still needed to consider whether the restriction was proportionate to the objective. It noted that the legislation was based on a "scientific consensus that prior stunning was the optimum means of reducing the animal's suffering at the time of slaughter." The legislatures, while requiring the use of that optimum method within their jurisdiction, had taken care to formulate their legislation in a manner that minimized the restriction of religious freedom and had not attempted to prohibit the sale of meat imported from outside the provinces, even if the animals were killed in ways prohibited within the provinces.
Here, the legislatures may have been too cautious. I doubt that it would be a violation of religious freedom to prohibit the sale of meat from animals whose throats are cut while they are fully conscious. Jewish religious beliefs, as I understand them, do not require Jews to eat meat. So why is it a restriction of religious freedom to say: if this is what you believe, then don't eat meat.
The case is less clear for Muslims because some Muslims believe that they are required to eat meat at the Eid ad-Adha, or Feast of Sacrifice. If that claim is accepted, then legislatures could pass a law allowing meat from animals slaughtered without prior stunning to be sold during the week before Eid. In that way, infringements of religious freedom would be kept to an absolute minimum, while the protection of animals, both within and beyond the jurisdiction of the legislature, would be maximized. ©2024 Project Syndicate
Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, is Founder of the organisation The Life You Can Save.