A vegan activist will this week bring a test case to have the term ‘ethical veganism’ recognized as a belief system, and afforded similar protections to religious beliefs.
Jordi Casamitjana is taking his former employer, the League Against Cruel Sports, to an employment tribunal. He says the animal welfare charity sacked him after he revealed to other employees that the organization invested its pension funds in companies involved in animal testing (the charity says that Casamitjana was sacked for ‘misconduct’).
Casamitjana, who has crowdfunded his legal action, says he is bringing the case to prevent vegans from facing ‘veganphobia‘ at work or in public. On the Crowd Justice website, Casamitjana says that the action aims to perform two main functions:
- To apply pressure to charities and ethical organizations to invest only in ways that are compatible with their (and their supporters’) beliefs
- To test, for the first time in a UK court, the ‘philosophical belief in ethical veganism’.
Casamitjana’s law firm, Slater & Gordon, has described it as a landmark case. In a statement, it said: “Ethical veganism is a philosophical belief held by a significant portion of the population in the UK and around the world. The case sets out how the belief in principle, and how Jordi’s particular interpretations of it, meet the required legal test.”
