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Rabbit Advocacy Animal Matters
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WTO
‘morals’ decision could escalate animal welfare disputes Foie gras, veal, even your run-of-the-mill broiler chickens could face trade restrictions on the grounds that the treatment of the animals to make the products violates “public morals,” observers of a precedent-setting World Trade Organization decision say. A WTO appeals panel on Thursday upheld the European Union’s ban on imports of seal furs, meat, blubber and other products, potentially opening up a Pandora’s box of animal welfare-related trade measures that could throw the global trading system into disarray, trade watchers say. The European Union has said the annual clubbing and shooting of hundreds of thousands of seals is abhorrent enough to justify the 4-year-old ban. Now, the WTO’s final decision backing the EU law could establish some important guidelines for how a country can use public morality to defend a trade measure. Critics of the ban, which was challenged by Canada and Norway, tried to advance the argument that upholding the public morals justification would set a dangerous precedent and could open a floodgate of similar prohibitions on animal products. “When you do that, then you’re in danger of all the other industries being banned in the same way,” Terry Audla, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, an association representing more than 50,000 Inuits, told The Canadian Press. “I mean, who’s to say what’s more cruel? Industrialized agriculture? The poultry, pork and beef industry?” The Inuits were a driving force behind the Canadian government’s fight against the European ban. The EU law makes an exception for seal products culled from indigenous, as opposed to commercial, hunts, but Canada argued that exception has benefited other native populations more than its own. Animal rights groups, which have been trying to shut the hunt down, say the WTO appeals decision could play to their advantage. Now that it’s enshrined in WTO case law, the public morals defense could create an opening to persuade other countries to enact morals-based trade restrictions on a wide range of products from animals raised in what the groups argue are inhumane conditions. There’s no shortage of controversial farming practices drawing fire from animal welfare groups, whether its the confinement of sows in gestation crates and calves in tiny cells for producing veal, the cramming thousands of livestock into concentrated animal feeding operations or the culling of male chicks by use of a high-speed grinder. “The reality is that animal welfare is being discussed at so many levels of global policy and trade, and the trade arena is one of those forums,” said Rebecca Aldworth, executive director of Humane Society International Canada. But whether the public morals defense opens doors to other cases is a fairly complex issue, Aldworth said. “We’re very much in the infancy of this,” she said. “This is the first time animal welfare as a public moral has been discussed at the World Trade Organization.” Given the subjectivity of the new standard, those seeking to place bans on animal products or institute other trade restrictions will still have to justify the measures with a “very strong body of evidence that the measure improves public morals,” Aldworth said. Legal experts, however, debate whether the decision really sets a precedent for justifying trade restrictions based on on animal welfare — either as genuine defense of public morals or as a way to protect domestic industries. |