The Swiss parliament is prepared to vote on possibly banning kosher meat imports, a move being decried by Jewish leaders there as harming religious freedom, the Jewish Chronicle reported on Monday.
The amorphous bill would make it illegal to bring into the country any meat slaughtered in what the law would deem to be an "inhumane fashion." The law could cover both kosher and halal meats, where the animal is still conscious at the point of slaughter.
A date certain for a vote hasn’t been set, the Chronicle said.
The English-language Swiss newspaper Le News reported that originally the bill targeted foie gras, frogs legs and fur, but there are suggestions the proposal could also include animals slaughtered according to certain Islamic and Jewish rituals.
Katharina Büttiker, the president of the Swiss Animal Alliance, a group that worked on the bill with socialist Swiss legislator Matthias Aebischer, told the newspaper Tages-Anzeiger that she believed the proposed ban should consider the religious-linked products where animals have had their throats cut before being stunned, per Le News.
The practice is banned in Switzerland, but the country allows imports of such products to the Jewish and Muslim communities, Le News noted.
"(The bill would) be a massive limitation on the religious freedoms of Jews," said Herbert Winter, president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, per the Chronicle. There are about 18,000 Jews currently living in Switzerland, according to figures from the European Jewish Congress.
The federation charged, noted the Chronicle, that the proposed measure is "generally understood to have been an anti-Semitic act."