AMSTERDAM — Dutch lawmakers have advanced a bill banning the slaughter of livestock without stunning it first, removing an exemption that has let Jews and Muslims butcher animals according to their centuries-old dietary rules.
If the bill is enacted, religious groups say, observant Jews and Muslims will have to import meat from abroad, stop eating it altogether, or leave the Netherlands.
However, the bill still must pass the Senate, which is unlikely before the summer recess, and the Cabinet said Monday that the law may be unenforceable in current form due in part to ambiguity introduced in a late amendment.
If the Netherlands outlaws procedures that make meat kosher for Jews or halal for Muslims, it will be the second country after New Zealand to do so in recent years. Switzerland and the Scandinavian and Baltic countries have bans that are mostly traceable to pre-World War II anti-Semitism.
In New York, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Tuesday’s vote in the lower house, with its national director, Abraham Foxman, calling it “a de facto ban on kosher slaughter” that “has repudiated the Netherlands’ historic commitment to religious freedom.”
Dutch lawmaker Marianne Thieme of the Party for the Animals — the world’s first animal-rights party to win seats in a national parliament — welcomed the approval of the bill. She has argued that sparing animals needless pain and distress outweighs religious groups’ rights to follow slaughter practices “no longer of our time.”
