Cracking down on illegal slaughtering requires conviction and criminal punishment in accordance with the law

Yuecheng District, Shaoxing City, Zhejiang, has implemented designated poultry slaughtering for nearly 5 months, but in the Chengnan Subdistrict farmers' market, roadside vegetable shops and residential communities, there still exist many phenomena such as live poultry slaughtered on the spot and sales of slaughtered white poultry without leg rings. As the weather turns cold, the risk of H7N9 gradually increases. Recently, the Jiaxing area confirmed the first case of human infection with H7N9 influenza since the start of winter.

Compared with regular slaughterhouses, illegal slaughtering is extremely harmful. Not only does it lack the corresponding sanitary license conditions, it may even produce “water-injected meat” in order to seek exorbitant profits. In addition, illegal slaughtering often evades supervision by national law enforcement departments. The source of its poultry and livestock and the quality of its products both lack testing, food safety cannot be guaranteed, and it seriously harms the health of citizens.

According to convention, in supervising illegal slaughtering behavior, most places only impose administrative penalties for violations, and the penalties are mainly economic in form. Obviously, this kind of penalty method easily forms a vicious cycle of stopping as soon as an inspection is made and rebounding once supervision is lost, and cannot effectively fundamentally eliminate illegal slaughtering behavior. Also, because the construction of standardized poultry slaughtering points varies from place to place, many places limit the targets of illegal slaughtering only to live pigs. For the supervision of slaughtering poultry other than pigs, such as chickens and ducks, this largely creates man-made loopholes.

Article 143 of the Criminal Law stipulates that whoever produces or sells food that does not meet food safety standards, sufficient to cause a serious food poisoning accident or other serious food-borne diseases, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years or criminal detention, and shall also be fined.

The new judicial interpretation clearly stipulates that producing or selling food that does not meet food safety standards shall be recognized as “sufficient to cause a serious food poisoning accident or other serious food-borne diseases” as stipulated in Article 143 of the Criminal Law. It can be seen that, compared with the Criminal Law, the new judicial interpretation more clearly expresses a strict punishment attitude toward illegal production and sales that do not meet food safety standards, such as illegal slaughtering.

At present, the methods of food safety crimes involving illegal slaughtering are constantly innovating, the means are becoming more concealed, and some are even sold through the Internet and express delivery. It is becoming increasingly difficult to determine the nature of criminal cases. However, the judicial interpretation further clarifies the conviction and sentencing standards for food safety-related crimes involving illegal slaughtering, weaving a tight criminal legal net for punishing crimes in accordance with the law. In punishing food safety crimes involving illegal slaughtering, as long as law enforcement forces from market supervision, administrative law enforcement, health and epidemic prevention and other departments carry out joint law enforcement together, remove from the source the environmental conditions that breed food safety crimes involving illegal slaughtering, and convict and pursue criminal punishment in accordance with the law, eradicating evil completely should not be a very difficult matter.