Kosher Slaughter Under Fire From EU
Kosher butchers rely on Shechita UK to defend their practices
The organisation that represents the kosher practice of slaughtering animals has lodged a complaint against a European Commission project that claims to facilitate the adoption of good religious slaughter practices.
Shechita UK is accusing DIALREL, a project funded by the European Commission Directorate-General for Health and Consumers, of defaming the practice of shechita online. DIALREL aims to promote dialogue between faiths but Shechita UK chairman Henry Grunwald OBE QC said it has refused to remove defamatory information on a website affiliated with the project.
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The website description says: "Shechita: Animals are slaughtered without stunning. Before slaughter, all cattle are restrained and mechanically turned on their back and all poultry shackled."
Grunwald said: "To claim that cattle are restrained and mechanically turned on their back and all poultry shackled is factually incorrect and defamatory. To allege that animals are slaughtered without stunning denies the most effective stun which is incorporated in the shechita procedure."
Dr Mara Miele, project coordinator of DIALREL, said she was "sorry" if the poster on the website had "offended the Shechita UK board". Miele added that there was "no hidden agenda, quite the contrary" and that the "misrepresentation" on the website had come from "differences between UK and European practices".
Chanoch Kesselman and Shlomo Winegarten of Shechita UK, attended a DIALREL meeting in Brussels and protested about the website description to one of the academics responsible for the research. However, no changes have been made to the website.
DIALREL says that its main aim is "to explore the conditions for promoting the dialogue between interested parties and stakeholders and facilitating the adoption of good religious slaughter practices. The additional aim is to review and propose a mechanism for implementation and monitoring of good practices."
Shechita UK insists that the DIALREL project has an "anti-shechita" agenda and said it would be calling on the European Union to ensure that the project is not abusing government funding "to promote its own agenda by purporting to present academic research".
Grunwald said: "This matter has tainted DIALREL and Shechita UK can have no confidence in what is supposed to be an academic study.
"DIALREL cannot promote a dialogue with interested parties when it so clearly has an anti-shechita bias. It has rapidly diverted to a pseudo-academic survey publishing agenda based untruths."
In June 2009 the EU passed a law that safeguarded shechita by recognising the validity of religious slaughter practices.
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