Rights conference

This year’s Rights Conference took place online, with attendees from all over the world

Due to the pandemic, The Vegan Society’s International Rights Conference 2020 took place online. The event reached full capacity, with attendees from all around the world.

The conference was held in association with The Portuguese Vegetarian Association and Portugal’s Animal Alliance. We kicked off with Nuno Alvim of the Portuguese Vegetarian Society and Elisa Nair of Portugal’s Animal Alliance explaining how their respective organisations aim to advance veganism in Portugal. Nuno Alvim is well known for his contribution to bring about legislation for vegan food to be provided in all public institutions throughout Portugal. An important function of Elisa’s organisation is training chefs and certifying catering outlets that veganise dishes on their menu. Elisa is also a lawyer and explained the work she has been involved with to formally register the complaints of vegans who have not had equal access to state funding food support.

Catering for Everyone

Sabrina Ahmed, who leads on our Catering for Everyone campaign, explained the variety of ways The Vegan Society supports and provides information to public bodies such as schools and hospitals, and how the campaign to create greater access to healthy, nutritious plant-based food is grounded in human rights and anti-discrimination law.

A new speaker this year was vegan MEP Francisco Guerreiro, who explained how many European Union regulations were relevant to the concerns of vegans and advancing veganism. In relation to the EU, Ronja Berthold, Head of Public Affairs at the European Vegetarian Union, and Marie Laffineur-Pauchet in France, explained how restricting plant-based food producers from using traditional words to describe plant-based vegan foods was not grounded in evidence and is counterproductive to supporting the obvious consumer shift towards plant-based food.

Animal lawyer Adam Karp gave an overview of veganism and law in the USA. Adam explained how a newly formed ‘vegan religion’ known as ‘Relonism’ had been recognised in the USA as being worthy of protection in court. Dr Carlo Prisco spoke about the situation for vegans in Italy, and Angel Radich in Australia explained the complexities of accommodating vegans under Australian law.

Equality law

A familiar conference speaker was Ralf Muller Amenitsch from Germany, who explained his work on the committee to produce an international standard for vegan food labelling. Ralf confirmed that an international standard would be published by the end of 2020.

Speakers from the UK included Jordi Casamitjana who talked about his recent legal case that confirmed vegans in Great Britain are protected under equality law, Edie Bowles from Advocates for Animals, who gave an overview of the protection for vegans in education, Dr Jeanette Rowley who spoke about how vegans have been unfairly investigated under counter terrorism safeguarding policy, and trainee solicitor Jess Swallow, who explained that hunting continues despite being illegal, while those who campaign to have the law upheld are unfairly targeted as extremists.

Dr Jeanette Rowley, Chair of the Network, congratulated the conference production team. She commented that shifting to an online conference was certainly a challenge, but the team’s commitment, dedication and professionalism prevailed, ensuring an exceptionally well-presented threeday event.