Iconic animal rights campaigner Brigitte Bardot has written to Gianni Infantino, the President of Fifa, in support of the IAWPC’s campaign.
Below is a transcript of the letter:
My foundation is part of the IAWPC coalition of more than 20 prestigious international animal protection organisations – including leading experts in the ethical and responsible management of animals – which has repeatedly shown you in recent months unbearable visual evidence and eyewitness accounts of the killing of dogs in Morocco to clean up the streets ahead of the football World Cup in 2030.
Yet nothing seems to convince you that Morocco is lying when it claims that the killings have stopped since August 2024. Testimonies continue to pour in to my Foundation: animals poisoned with strychnine, shot dead or left to die in a pool of blood, chased and grabbed with archaic tongs only to be brutally thrown into the back of vehicles where they pile on top of other dogs in total terror, then taken to warehouses where an atrocious death awaits them.
Other dogs are captured to be supposedly sterilised and then left to starve in filthy buildings.
If that wasn’t enough, children are also victims of these horrible traumas, and here again Morocco is in total breach of its commitments, since the United Nations Convention on the Protection of Children stipulates since 18 September 2023 that ‘children must be protected against all forms of physical and psychological violence and exposure to violence, such as domestic violence or violence inflicted on animals’. (General comment 26).
His Majesty King Mohammed VI had, however, in April 2017, in response to my request to stop the killing of street dogs, sent very clearly through the Ministry of the Interior his desire for an
operational plan to sterilise stray dogs. The IAWPC coalition has offered Morocco its expertise, but killing still seems to be the preference.
I ask you to disqualify Morocco from hosting the football World Cup until the killings have been genuinely halted and made official. This must go hand in hand with the implementation of ethical and responsible management of stray animals, in compliance with best practices, thanks to collaboration with international experts from the IAWPC coalition.
You cannot be complicit in so much suffering and fail to condemn these appalling practices. To turn a deaf ear to all the denunciations and complaints that have been addressed to you for months now casts real doubt on FIFA’s values and integrity.
I look forward to a prompt reaction and hope that this World Cup will reflect humanism and not the barbarity of the hypocritical omerta.
Brigitte Bardot, President
