Slaughterhouse increases exports after EU court ruling

A kosher slaughterhouse in southern Hungary has increased its exports to Belgium since the European Union's highest court last month upheld a law in the country's Flanders region that outlawed slaughtering animals without first stunning them into unconsciousness.

Jewish law forbids injuring an animal before it is killed, so the Belgian stunning requirement renders meat and poultry non-kosher.

The European Court of Justice ruling may have given the Hungarian facility a short-term business boost, but it has provoked fears of an eventual EU-wide prohibition on the production and sale of kosher meat.

Animal rights groups which pushed for the Flanders law argued that ritual slaughter without stunning is tantamount to animal cruelty.

But Slomo Koves, the Chief Rabbi of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities which owns the slaughterhouse in Csengele, Hungary, told The Associated Press that the increasing interrelatedness of European Jewish communities means the court's decision will reverberate beyond Belgium's borders and that he fears the next step after banning ritual slaughter will be a Europe-wide prohibition on the sale of kosher meat.

"This court decision, which right now affects only Belgium doesn't only affect the Belgian Jewish community," he said.

Passed in the name of animal rights, the 2017 Flemish law - and a similar one in the Wallonia region of Belgium - joins a list of regulations in another six European countries which ban slaughter without stunning or sedation, which is most often performed through electric shock or a bolt gun to the animal's skull.

The practice, which often kills or irreparably injures the animal, is not permitted under Jewish law which forbids injury or damage to animals' tissues before slaughtering them for food.

Muslim groups have argued that the stunning requirements in Flanders and Wallonia preclude halal ritual slaughtering as well, and allege the laws have come from efforts by Belgium's Islamophobic far-right to harass their communities.

But according to Reineke Hameleers, CEO of the Brussels-based animal protection organisation Eurogroup for Animals, scientific bodies such as the European Food Safety Authority have demonstrated that animals "suffer tremendously" when they are slaughtered while conscious.

She believes that reversible stunning is the bare minimum to protect animals and that animals should be rendered unconscious before being killed, using a temporary, non-fatal stunning procedure.

Some Muslim religious authorities consider permissible in the production of halal meat but Jewish authorities do not.

Rabbi Koves believes that the kosher slaughter method, known as shechita, is no less humane than the methods used in conventional meat production.

The method uses a sharp knife and is performed by a 'shochet' trained to make the cut in a single smooth motion, severing the animal's nerves and draining the blood from the brain in seconds.

Laws requiring the pre-slaughter stunning of animals appeared in some European countries as early as the late 19th century, with the EU requiring the pre-stunning of animals since 1979 while allowing member states to make religion-based exceptions.

Most do, but lawmakers across Europe have been increasingly open to either curtailing or doing away with the exemptions. Slovenia, Denmark and Sweden, as well as non-EU members Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, make no religious exceptions, forcing their religious communities to import kosher and halal meat from abroad.

Jewish and Muslim groups challenged the Flanders law in Belgium's Constitutional Court, which referred it to the European Court of Justice for a ruling on its compatibility with EU law.

The Court of Justice's advocate general advised the court to strike it down, arguing it violated the rights of certain faiths to preserve their essential religious rites.

But the court disagreed, finding the law "allow(s) a fair balance to be struck between the importance attached to animal welfare and the freedom of Jewish and Muslim believers to manifest their religion," since it limits only one aspect of ritual slaughter but not the slaughter itself.

Now religious groups worry the decision could lead to other European governments introducing similar restrictions affecting ritual slaughter, and make challenges to such laws unlikely to find redress in the court.

Rabbi Koves said: "it's a shock for us that the European court would put the so-called animal rights above human rights."