Two recent court decisions have strengthened legal recognition of the rights of people to live according to their vegan beliefs.
In Europe, a human rights court has ruled that genuine and consistently held vegan beliefs can be protected under the right to freedom of thought and conscience. In Peru, a constitutional court has ordered the country's oldest university to provide a permanent vegan menu after students argued that being denied suitable food violated their fundamental rights.
These decisions are important not only for vegans. Protecting the right to live vegan helps give practical effect to the recognition that animals should not be treated as resources for human use.
On 16 July 2026, the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in the case G.K. and A.S. v Switzerland.
The case involved two Swiss vegans who were dependent on public institutions for their food. One was held in pre-trial detention in a prison and the other was involuntarily confined in a psychiatric hospital.
Both repeatedly sought nutritionally adequate vegan food in accordance with their ethical beliefs. They were not systematically provided with meals that were entirely vegan and their attempts to have their complaints properly considered by Swiss authorities became caught in procedural barriers.
The European Court found that their vegan beliefs met the required level of "cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance" to fall within the protection of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
Importantly, the Court also held that following a vegan diet can be a direct expression of those protected beliefs.
The Court said that, where people with genuine and consistently held vegan beliefs are deprived of their liberty and depend on public authorities for food, those authorities have a positive obligation to address their requests in substance and within a clear legal framework.
It found that Switzerland had violated both Article 9 and Article 13, which guarantees the right to an effective remedy.
The ruling does not mean that every request by a vegan must automatically be granted regardless of circumstances. Institutions may take account of genuine organisational, financial, nutritional and practical constraints. But they cannot simply dismiss vegan beliefs as a preference or avoid properly considering them.
The Court also made an important practical distinction: a vegetarian meal is not necessarily suitable for a vegan. In one of the cases, vegetarian food continued to contain or potentially contain milk, eggs, animal fats and animal-derived sauces, sometimes leaving the applicant unable to eat the meal provided.
Vegan Australia was one of three organisations granted permission by the European Court of Human Rights to make a formal third-party intervention in the case, alongside The Vegan Society and the Criminal Law Research Center of the Free University of Brussels.
Vegan Australia submitted detailed legal arguments jointly prepared by Angela Radich of Squire Patton Boggs and the Animal Defenders Office.
Our submission argued that ethical veganism is a deeply held matter of conscience and should receive the same protection under human rights law as other serious beliefs, whether religious or non-religious.
It also provided the Court with information about the position of vegans in Australian prisons and hospitals. The submission explained that while some Australian jurisdictions expressly provided vegan meals, practice was inconsistent and non-religious ethical beliefs were sometimes treated less seriously than religious beliefs.
The European Court of Human Rights expressly referred to Vegan Australia's submissions in its judgment. It summarised our argument that most ethical vegans hold their beliefs as matters of deep personal conviction and apply them across areas of life including food, clothing and entertainment.
The Court ultimately accepted the central legal proposition we had advanced: genuine vegan convictions can fall within the protection of the freedom of thought and conscience in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Australian human rights legislation (in Victoria, Queensland and the ACT) reflects Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is the equivalent of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights considered by the Court. On this basis, Vegan Australia considers that there is a principled basis for recognising ethical veganism as a protected belief in at least some jurisdictions of Australia as well.
Although the Court's judgment is not directly binding on Australia, such decisions of international human rights courts may be considered by Australian courts when determining the extent to which the rights of ethical vegans are protected by our human rights legislation.
A separate development in Peru shows the growing recognition of vegan rights in another legal system.
In May 2026, the Sixth Constitutional Court of Lima ruled in favour of students at the National University of San Marcos who had sought access to vegan food in the university dining hall.
The students had begun legal proceedings in February 2024 after the university failed to provide a suitable vegan meal.
The court found that the university's failure to accommodate the students' vegan beliefs affected fundamental rights including equality, non-discrimination, freedom of conscience and the free development of personality.
It ordered the university to introduce a permanent vegan menu with equivalent standards of accessibility, nutritional adequacy and free provision to the ordinary university menu.
The court also ordered the university to conduct an official census of vegan students so that it could plan food purchasing and preparation according to actual demand.
Animal-rights lawyer Isaac Pena Lobato of Derecho Animal en Peru, who worked on the case, has described it as the first judgment of its kind in Latin America.
The university has appealed the ruling, so the legal process is not yet complete. The students' representatives have also sought immediate enforcement of the first-instance decision while the appeal proceeds.
Vegan rights are sometimes described as being principally about protecting people from discrimination. That is important, but it is not the whole reason these cases matter.
The beliefs being protected arise from opposition to the violation of the rights of animals.
One of the applicants in the European case explicitly explained his beliefs by referring to male chicks being killed in the egg industry, calves being separated from their mothers and cows and chickens being killed when they are no longer profitable. The Court recognised the direct connection between beliefs of this kind and refusing to consume animal-derived food.
Protecting a vegan person's freedom of conscience therefore helps protect their ability to refuse participation in practices that violate the rights of animals.
A person should not have to abandon their commitment to the rights of animals because they enter a hospital, prison, university, care home, school or workplace.
As legal systems begin to recognise veganism as a serious ethical belief rather than a personal preference, the assumption that using animals is simply the default becomes harder to sustain.
The idea of using human rights law to advance veganism has developed considerably over the past two decades.
The International Vegan Rights Alliance, now part of The Vegan Society's International Rights Network, was established to advance the rights of animals by protecting the ability of people to live vegan.
Its work has included challenging discrimination against vegans in workplaces and public institutions, seeking suitable vegan food in hospitals, prisons and schools, defending accurate labelling and supporting legal recognition of veganism as a protected ethical belief.
In 2020, a UK employment tribunal ruled in the case Casamitjana v League Against Cruel Sports that ethical veganism could qualify as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act.
The European Court's 2026 judgment takes this development considerably further. It is an authoritative international human rights ruling recognising that genuine vegan beliefs can fall within freedom of conscience and that public authorities may have positive obligations to respond to them.
The Peru judgment shows similar principles emerging outside Europe.
Using the law to protect the ability to live vegan is one part of the broader movement towards justice for animals. Legal recognition of vegan beliefs challenges the idea that participation in animal use should simply be assumed or imposed.
Vegan Australia has supported the development of vegan rights for many years, including through participation in the international vegan rights movement and our formal intervention in the European Court of Human Rights proceedings.
We will continue to monitor developments in Australia and internationally and advocate for public institutions to respect people who seek to live according to the principle that animals are not ours to use.
If you experience discrimination or difficulty living vegan in an Australian institution, workplace or service, we encourage you to document what happened and contact Vegan Australia.
Read more about Vegan Australia's earlier work on discrimination against vegans and our report on the UK decision recognising ethical veganism as a protected belief.
Image: CherryX per Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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