🌍 World Animal Justice Turns 3: How WAJ Advances Global Animal Justice in 2026 — Ready for UNCC15!
🎂 As World Animal Justice (WAJ) celebrates its third anniversary, 2026 marks an important new stage in our mission to advance global animal justice through law.
⚖️ Since its launch on 12 August 2023, WAJ has taken the lead in developing innovative legal pathways to strengthen the protection of animals worldwide — particularly through our work to achieve international recognition and prohibition of the most serious crimes against animals, including crimes against animality and zoocide.
🌍 Three years later, what began as an ambitious legal initiative has grown into an expanding international network connecting experts, NGOs and coalitions around a common objective: building a global legal framework capable of delivering justice for animals.
📚 Our journey and achievements are documented in our previous WAJ Annual Reports 2024 and WAJ Annual Report 2025.
🌐 A growing global network for animal justice
🤝 WAJ now brings together more than 50 animal law experts worldwide, connecting expertise across animal law, international law, criminal justice and related fields. Discover our global expert network: https://worldanimaljustice.org/experts/
🐾 Our network also includes more than 20 animal NGOs and seven international coalitions, strengthening collaboration between organisations working across countries and legal systems. Discover WAJ’s partners: https://worldanimaljustice.org/partners/
📣 At the same time, our wider community continues to grow, with more than 3,000 followers on LinkedIn joining and following our work: https://www.linkedin.com/company/world-animal-justice/
📚 Since our creation, WAJ has organised more than 10 webinars and published over 20 blog articles, alongside expert reports, policy briefs and other legal resources advocating for stronger legal protection of animals, including at the International Criminal Court and the United Nations Crime Congress.
🇺🇳 Bringing animals to the heart of the UN Crime Congress
🚨 One of WAJ’s most important priorities in 2026 is our participation in the 15th United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (UNCC15), taking place in Abu Dhabi from 26 September to 1 October 2026.
⚖️ WAJ will bring a fundamental message to this major international criminal-justice forum: animal exploitation and wildlife crime cannot be treated as isolated or secondary issues when they are deeply interconnected with organised crime, environmental crime and other serious criminal activities.
📘 To build the evidence behind this advocacy, we published our new WAJ Expert Report, “Animals and Crime Convergence: Addressing Animal Exploitation and Organized Crime”.
🔎 The report explores how crimes involving animals intersect with broader criminal networks and activities, highlighting why recognising animals within crime-convergence approaches can strengthen both animal protection and global crime-prevention efforts.
🎥 These issues were also explored during our WAJ Expert Webinar “Animals at the Core of Crime Convergence – Animal Exploitation & Organized Crime”, bringing together expertise on the connections between animal exploitation and organised criminality. Watch the webinar replay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1PrXR4jETc&feature=youtu.be
📢 Mobilising civil society for UNCC15
🤝 Research alone is not enough. WAJ has also worked to transform legal analysis into a collective international advocacy effort ahead of UNCC15.
📜 Our new WAJ Policy Declaration for UNCC15 has been endorsed by more than 35 NGOs worldwide, demonstrating growing civil-society support for stronger recognition of crimes against animals within international crime-prevention and criminal-justice policies.
👉 Discover the WAJ Policy Declaration for UNCC15 and supporting materials at: https://worldanimaljustice.org/info/
🌍 Through this declaration, WAJ and supporting organisations seek to ensure that animal protection is meaningfully considered in the international discussions that will help shape global criminal-justice priorities for the years ahead.
🦏 Strengthening the international response to wildlife crime
🌿 Wildlife crime is another major dimension of WAJ’s UNCC15 advocacy.
📑 In June 2026, WAJ published a new Policy Brief on Wildlife Crime by Dr Meganne Natali, addressing a fundamental issue for international criminal policy: how wildlife crime should be defined and understood.
👉 Read the WAJ Policy Brief by Dr Meganne Natali.
⚖️ Developing clearer legal definitions is essential to improving recognition, prevention and enforcement. By contributing legal expertise to this debate, WAJ aims to strengthen the international framework for addressing crimes affecting wildlife.
📣 Bringing WAJ’s research into the global animal advocacy movement
🌐 WAJ’s work on crime convergence has also gained visibility through international animal-protection networks.
🐾 The World Federation for Animals (WFA) featured WAJ’s Report on Animals and Crime Convergence in its June 2026 newsletter.
📢 WFA also highlighted WAJ’s advocacy ahead of UNCC15, helping bring the connections between wildlife crime, environmental crime and animal protection to a wider global audience.
🌍 Expanding access to animal law in Africa
📚 Alongside our international criminal-justice advocacy, WAJ has continued developing legal resources designed to support animal-law research and advocacy around the world.
🌍 One important milestone is the development of the WAJ African Animal Law Database, following the one in Asia, expanding access to legislation and legal information concerning animal protection across African jurisdictions.
⚖️ Making animal-law information accessible is an important part of building effective legal advocacy. By bringing legislation together in a dedicated resource, WAJ aims to support lawyers, researchers, NGOs, advocates and policymakers working to strengthen animal protection across Asia and Africa.
-> Discover WAJ Database of Animal Laws for Asia and Africa HERE
🤝 Connecting animal justice with wider systemic challenges
🌎 WAJ’s work increasingly connects animal protection with other major systemic challenges — including environmental protection, climate change, organised crime, food systems and the financing of animal exploitation.
🏦 In June 2026, WAJ collaborated with the Stop Financing Factory Farming (SFFF) coalition for the webinar “Livestock’s Lengthening Shadow”, exploring the wider impacts of industrial animal agriculture and the major financial systems that continue to support it.
▶️ The webinar and its resources were subsequently shared by SFFF HERE.
🎓 Earlier in March 2026, WAJ Founder and Director Dr Sabine Brels also participated in the AVA Academy in Berlin, leading a morning elective session on “New Pathways in Animal Law and Policy Advocacy.”
⚖️ The session explored innovative legal strategies available to the animal-protection movement and emerging opportunities to use law as a tool for systemic change.
👉 Discover the AVA Academy initiative and WAJ’s participation HERE.
🌱 From animal justice to transforming the systems behind animal exploitation
🚀 WAJ’s systemic approach also led to the development and launch of Food Forward Europe (FFE) in 2025 — a legal initiative addressing the structural imbalance in EU agricultural subsidies between livestock production and plant-protein crops for human consumption.
🇪🇺 FFE explores how European law and strategic advocacy can help reform agricultural funding so that public subsidies better align with EU climate, environmental and animal-welfare obligations while supporting the transition towards more sustainable food systems.
🌱 During the first half of 2026, FFE moved from research to concrete legal and policy advocacy, including a major report on CAP reform, a European civil-society Joint Statement and legislative amendment proposals.
👉 Discover the dedicated Food Forward Europe initiative and its latest work: https://www.foodforwardeurope.org/
🚀 Looking ahead: taking global animal justice further
⏳ The second half of 2026 represents an important next step for WAJ.
🇺🇳 In September, we will bring our work to the 15th UN Crime Congress, advocating for stronger international recognition of crimes affecting animals and ensuring that animal exploitation is no longer overlooked within global discussions on organised crime and criminal justice.
🌍 At the same time, we will continue strengthening our international expert and NGO network, developing accessible legal resources, advancing innovative legal strategies and building collaborations capable of transforming how legal systems protect animals.
⚖️ Three years after WAJ was launched, our objective remains ambitious and clear: to ensure that animals are no longer invisible within the legal systems designed to prevent and punish the world’s most serious harms.
🐾 By combining legal expertise, international collaboration, research and innovative advocacy, World Animal Justice will continue working towards a future in which global justice truly extends to animals.
👉 Discover World Animal Justice and join our global movement for legal justice for animals: https://worldanimaljustice.org/