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In December, Legal Counsel for Animals Australia, Shatha Hamade was announced as recipient of the 2024 Voiceless Brian Sherman Animal Law Prize. The prize was founded in honour of Brian Sherman, a distinguished businessman and founder of Voiceless. In her role for Animals Australia, Hamade has fearlessly gone into slaughterhouses and led Supreme Court actions to battle for maltreated and abused animals.

“The law is not ticking the boxes we expect it to tick, so we ventilate these ideas in court to start conversations,” says Shatha Hamade of her impressive career. Hamade was formerly the national coordinator of the Barristers Animal Welfare Panel, legal Counsel for RSPCA SA, and Associate to the most senior Judge of the Federal Court of Australia. Her role at Animals Australia takes her around Australia and overseas, working within various court jurisdictions as part of her legal advocacy for the welfare of animals. She conducts in-country global investigations into the live animal export industry, and seeks protection for animals suffering within factory farms and other industries.

From investment banking to a career in law

Hamade tells LSJ, “Law school was a career change for me. I was originally in the investment banking space. I grew up in a very humble Lebanese family in Sydney. My parents are migrants from Beirut, and they came to Australia in the very early 70s with not very much, so I was kind of born to study hard, do well, get a good job, get good money, get a mortgage, and all of those things.”

Following the graduate program at Commonwealth Bank, Hamade worked in their investments division for nine years. Then, a life altering event changed everything.

“I was not vegetarian. I had compassion for animals, but like most people, it was about my cats and my dogs. So, I never really questioned where food came from or anything like that. It was a Thursday night when something extraordinary happened. I was on my way to meet a friend after work, and as I was coming through Pitt Street Mall, Animal Liberation NSW had this massive stall up, and they had all these pictures of sow stalls, factory farmed chickens, foxes in fur farms, and animal testing photos. And I just stopped.”

The next morning, Hamade was a vegetarian. She also began juggling her project management role at Commonwealth Bank with voluntary work for Animal Liberation NSW.

“The more I got involved in their projects, the more I realised that we needed more hearts and minds in the law and in the political arena, and there weren’t any at that time. It was the early 2000s, and I started thinking about what I could do to bring more to the table. And I thought, ‘I actually do need to get a law degree’. I need to get some skin in the game here.”

Hamade completed her Juris Doctor, gained experience in commercial law, was a Judge’s Associate in the Federal Court, and says, “all the while, I was grooming my knowledge for becoming a crafty animal protection lawyer. The reason why I had to cut my teeth in commercial law, litigation, Judges’ associateship, and the reason I applied to go to the bar was there’s no such thing as animal law.”

She explains, “The law actually does not protect animals. It only protects them according to their use, and not their intrinsic value. So, I needed to get really creative around how I use the law, because this iron triangle between industry, government, and law was basically keeping the animals out, and the only way I could pierce it was through the law. There’s an inherent conflict of interest that exists within the Department of Agriculture, and the way the government is, by design, conflicted in terms of the animal welfare portfolio.”

Hamade iterates what fellow lawyer Mike Rosalky told LSJ in 2023 and says, “We need to extract animal welfare out of the Department of Agriculture and put it in its own independent office, because they’re wearing two hats. The fox is in charge of the hen house… Animals don’t vote. So guess who wins?”

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Legal Counsel for Animals Australia Shatha Hamade

A long overdue end to live export

Hamade has been going undercover wearing covert body cameras to investigate the live animal export trade internationally, particularly focusing on the Middle East and North Africa in recent times. She goes into the markets and slaughter spaces to document what happens to these animals.

“The ability to prosecute in this space in Australia is because the investigations began back in the 1990s by [current Animals Australia Strategy Director] Lyn White, an ex-police officer from NSW,” she says.

“Lyn got traction through Four Corners and 60 Minutes, and it became too dangerous for her to continue to go undercover as a very tall, blonde woman where she was immediately noticeable. I was a prosecutor for RSPCA for years, I speak Arabic, and I understand the culture so I could be trained up to go over there and do this work.”

Hamade tells of that time, “My observations were of egregious cruelty and violence in the handling of animals in these regions. A lot was down to lack of education, and programmed thinking that animals for food are purely to be slaughtered and eaten. Going into places where there is very primitive technology, and it’s a man with a knife or rope handling these big, magnificent animals. They’re terrified, they fight back, and their final moments are full of violence. Through Animals Australia, we rolled in laws known as the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System (ESCAS), which used to end in the jurisdiction. The new system made the Australian exporter legally responsible for the humane handling and slaughter of livestock in the importing country.”

Hamade concedes that the practical results haven’t borne out the intention of the laws.

“Animals are still going into these hell holes and being slaughtered in the same way,” she says.

“There was no stun slaughter, there was no kind of meaningful upgrade in the infrastructure. It was just more oversight, really. So, my job was to continue going over there repeatedly, many times a year, weeks at a time, and documenting over and over again what happens to these animals, bringing the evidence back to Australia, challenging the Federal Department of Agriculture on what I was documenting. Everywhere I went, there were breaches. Then they would roll out these administrative compliance, so-called sanctions, on exporters, but they had no sovereign rights within these countries to tell these countries what to do, so and the auditors within these country’s slaughterhouses were paid for by the exporter. Do you think that they’re going to bite the hand that feeds them? Of course, they’re going to clear them on the audit reports.

“Finally, Animals Australia decided that we’d had enough. We had given the Federal Department of Agriculture enough years to do their job, but they were toothless. I started crafting litigation with my barristers to sue the government and sue the exporters under the export control laws of Australia, because there were some pearlers in there around not exporting animals unless their welfare arrangements were assured. No one had ever tested these laws because no one had the capacity to test them, nor was there ever evidence that we could produce to test them.”

Then, an investigation shared on 60 Minutes changed the game.

“We were part of an investigation with a seafarer who used cameras on the ships to show the many thousands of deaths of cattle from heat stress that were occurring on these vessels. And these deaths had been occurring over many decades, but the Federal Department of Agriculture just saw it as a part of doing business in this trade. That’s what we litigated on, and that’s what then struck down supply chains. We got more media interest, got more public outrage, got more independent MPs incensed, got more private members bills introduced, and then it started. The government, in its usual way, was not ruling by its moral compass, but ruling by the popularity contest. Government decided live exports was an election issue and Labor made a courageous decision to phase out the trade, which passed in parliament in May 2024. The industry will be phased out by 2028 with a multimillion package for farmers.”

Hamade admits she has to be across local laws, planning laws for local councils, through to state, federal and international laws.

She says, “Prosecutions result in test cases around the world. Animals Australia has been change-making in precedent value, and we want to share that knowledge internationally. The law is one lever, but at the end of the day, we want to seed new ideas and new ways of doing things. The parliament sets laws according to its own interest, and although we live in a democracy, we see that the animals suffer egregiously from no protection because of the power of corporate lobby groups. The law is bereft in how it protects animals, but the clever ways we can use consumer protection and other factors embedded in laws is how we go in as animal lawyers. These cases in courts are about starting conversations, allowing media and community to take interest and make considered decisions about how they live with animals. The law is not ticking the boxes we expect it to tick, so we ventilate these ideas in court to start conversations.”

Hamade is presently involved in a major test case in the Supreme Court of Victoria.

“It’s about challenging carbon dioxide gassing of pigs in Australia. We gas 90 percent of pigs in gas chambers before they’re slaughtered. The laws around animal welfare in slaughterhouses does not accord with CO2 gassing machines. If we get this up, it will affect 90 percent of pig slaughterhouses in Australia. We want Victorians to realise what they’re investing in when they buy pork products. Winning is not necessarily the case itself, but the public knowledge, awareness and discussion that takes place as a result.”