On 16th July 2026, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Switzerland violated the fundamental rights of two vegans who were not consistently provided with vegan meals while held in detention facilities, confirming that ethical veganism and anti-speciesism are protected philosophical beliefs within Europe. This court is part of the Council of Europe and not the EU, and therefore Switzerland, a non-EU European country, is also covered by it (as are the UK, Norway and Turkey).

The Swiss case started with an animal rights activist being arrested in November 2018 for his direct-action activities and placed in pre-trial detention at Geneva's Champ-Dollon prison for 11 months. He took the government to court because he was not offered a sufficiently nutritious vegan diet. An appeal was deemed inadmissible by Switzerland's federal court in June 2020, after which the prisoner's lawyer took the case to the Strasbourg-based ECHR. A former patient at a Swiss psychiatric hospital unit joined the appeal. In October 2022, the court asked the Swiss state to consider whether the Geneva prison had violated Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

The Court has now confirmed that it did. The judgment found that the authorities had breached the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, as well as the right to an effective remedy. This case now adds to the other legal cases where veganism has been accepted as a protected characteristic, as has been the case in the UK since 2020, when a judge in Norwich Employment Tribunal first ruled that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010. The ECHR judges mentioned this case in their written judgement, as well as a 2021 case in Bologna, Italy.