Did The E.C.J Butcher Religious Freedom and Animal Welfare? A Response to Rovinsky

• Siddhanth Prasad
• Sai University School of Law, Chennai, India

 INTRODUCTION The member states of the European Union are not the first and will not be the last to grapple with the prickly issue of balancing animal welfare against religious freedom.1 Given the significant constitutional protections enjoyed by the latter across the world, the Court of Justice for the European Union (“CJEU”) is also unlikely to be the last court to have to untangle the knots created by the conflict. The decision of the CJEU in Centraal Israëlitisch Consistorie van België and Others v. Vlaamse Regering (“Centraal”) is thus but the latest episode in the global saga that is unfolding. The role of a court in this conflict, however, is necessarily limited. Unlike the legislature or the executive, the court’s judicial and moral reach is circumscribed by the facts of any particular dispute. In a recent article, Jeremy Rovinsky contended that the CJEU in Centraal was deficient on both counts, that is to say, both in its judicial analysis and in its moral principles.3 Rovinsky argued that by concurring with the decision of the Flemish Parliament to ban non-stunned ritual slaughter and in deciding that it would not be discriminatory to not apply the same rules to cultural and sporting events, the CJEU struck a disproportionate (or to use Rovinsky’s words, ‘no balance’) balance between religious freedom and animal welfare and undercut its own moral high ground vis-à-vis animal welfare. Instead, he argues, it would have been far more appropriate for the court to reject the ban and counter-propose a labelling initiative that would help consumers distinguish between stunned and non-stunned meat.