Document type : Article published in Le Monde (subscriber edition)
Author: Jean-Pierre Stroobants
Preview: A parliamentary bill proposing the stunning of animals before they are killed was rejected after having divided members of the regional government, party members and public opinion.
Images of divided parties sometimes driven to renounce their principles, a regional government under threat, a head-on clash between religious and secular principles and the heady scent of electoralism. This will be the legacy of the intense debate on the ritual slaughter of animals that took place in Bruxelles-Capitale, Belgium's third largest region. A proposal from the centrist Independent Federalist Democrat (DéFI) party, supported by the Flemish Greens and Liberals, which had set the ball rolling in October 2021, resulted in a very close vote on Friday 17 June - 42 against the stunning of animals before they are killed, 38 for, and 6 abstentions. This outcome is undoubtedly provisional, and will do nothing to calm feelings.
The bill was originally intended to harmonise the region's legislation with the law already in force in Flanders and Wallonia. The issue of animal welfare, highlighted in particular by the Union professionnelle vétérinaire, which pointed out that an animal can remain in agony for up to fourteen minutes when its throat is slit, was, however, quickly displaced by political and religious considerations.
The weight of public opinion
While the French animal rights organisation Gaia submitted a petition with 70,000 signatures in favour of stunning, a counter-petition has been issued containing 110,000 signatures to protect the Jewish religious practice of shehita and that of dhakat for Muslims. Practices that are exempt from the requirement to anaesthetise animals prior to slaughter as laid down by European regulations, and which had been banned in the other two Belgian regions in 2019, in the face of appeals from Muslim and Jewish organisations that invoked respect for freedom of worship.
The Belgian Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union did not accept the latters' arguments at the time, ruling that a ban on slaughter without stunning would violate neither the separation of religion and state nor freedom of belief. [End of text available to non-subscribers].
