Published: 11 January 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
A BAN ON THE JEWISH and Muslim methods of ritual slaughter of animals in Belgium’s northern Flemish region went into effect on January 1. The region’s capital is Antwerp, home to approximately 20,000 Jews.
This is just another step in a larger trend across Europe — which we’ve mapped out below, with individual restrictions and Jewish population numbers:
These policies have been in the works for a while. In the European Union’s countries, the post-World War II discussion on ritual slaughter began with a 1998 directive titled the “European Convention for the Protection of Animals for Slaughter,” which required stunning before slaughter except in the case of religious slaughter.
Because of this, some countries banned un-stunned ritual slaughter, which included both kosher and halal methods of ritual slaughter. This became a larger campaign, continent-wide. In 2004, the European Food Safety Authority wrote that “due to the serious animal welfare concerns associated with slaughter without stunning, pre-cut stunning should always be performed.”
In 2009, the EU Slaughter Regulation permitted religious slaughter without stunning. Because there is no European Union-wide regulation on slaughter without stunning, individual countries have decided for themselves whether to permit or ban kosher slaughter.
The EU does not require meat from un-stunned animals to be labelled as such, at the moment, and while proposals have been made for mandatory labelling, they have been dismissed.
FULL STORY All the European countries where kosher and halal meat production are now forbidden (Forward)
Image: Data from Jewish Data Bank and Library of Congress (Map by Shira Feder)
