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Most countries have laws explicitly banning cannibalism, but the Netherlands does not. It sounds like a loophole from a horror movie, yet it is a documented quirk of Dutch criminal law that legal scholars have discussed for decades.
The Dutch penal code was built around specific crimes like murder, mutilation of a corpse, and grave robbery. Nowhere in the code is the act of eating human flesh itself listed as a criminal offense, because lawmakers never anticipated needing to spell it out.
That means the actual crime always happens somewhere else in the process. Killing someone is illegal, desecrating a grave is illegal, and stealing a body part is illegal, but the eating part has no dedicated statute.
So legally, if human flesh were obtained through entirely legal means, there would be no law against consuming it. Think of a donated limb from a willing person, or tissue obtained with full legal consent and no theft involved.
Dutch legal experts have confirmed this gap publicly, noting that prosecutors would have to stretch other laws to bring charges. Some have called it one of the strangest unintentional holes in a modern European legal system.
It is not that the Netherlands endorses or encourages the practice in any way. It is simply that nobody ever wrote a law against it, because the scenario seemed too implausible to legislate.
The takeaway is less about horror and more about how legal systems work. Laws are reactive documents built to cover imagined situations, and sometimes the strangest ones slip through entirely unaddressed.
