Animals Australia lawyer Shatha Hamade awarded for her courageous work

LSJ online

 

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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Animals Australia lawyer Shatha Hamade awarded for her courageous work