Traditional hunting of larks: Victory! The State Council has urgently suspended the decrees
One Voice and the LPO have defended the fate of larks that have been trapped and killed in the name of traditional hunting in the Gironde, Landes, Lot-et-Garonne, and Pyrénées-Atlantiques Departments for the 2022-2023 hunting season. Our two associations filed emergency interim suspension proceedings on the Monday following the issue of the laws signed by the Ministry of the Ecological Transition. They defended birds tooth and nail before a ministry and hunters who did not know how to justify the pig-headedness of issuing new decrees that had scarcely been reformulated after the repeated cancellations and suspensions in preceding years.
There was an urgency to act and the State Council, consistent with past decisions, sided with our arguments. Field larks are on the list of birds classified on the IUCN Red List. And as the European Union Court of Justice recalled, France has not respected the European ‘Birds’ Directive of 30 November 2009 because it has contravened two exonerating criteria. On one hand, the absence of alternative techniques for trapping birds in particular, on the other, the fact that this technique allows the capture only of individuals of this species, in very limited numbers and without harm. The Ministry failed to demonstrate that the nets and cages were the only existing methods, that they only capture larks, or that they do not capture other bird species without killing any in the process…
The urgent applications judge at the State Council ruled that a “serious doubt” existed on the legality of the 2022 decrees challenged by One Voice and the LPO, and ordered them to be suspended immediately, from the day after the hearing.
«We come back here to the State Council each year, we would like this to be the last. And when I think about nature and the shared heritage of future generations, I have a dream, which should not be one, that the Ministry of Ecology will guarantee the protection of birds and biodiversity. And that their primary concern will not be to protect a hobby which is nothing other than that: a recreational hobby as we have heard during the hearing. Birds are disappearing and potentially there are cultural elements, but in that case, it should be the Ministry of Culture who must face us. Here it is about the Ministry of Ecology. It should be there to serve in protecting biodiversity.»Muriel Arnal, President of One Voice
When will the Ministry of Ecology stop delivering birds, whose species is disappearing through our own faults, to hunters, all while daring to talk about conservation and daring to say that they are worried about biodiversity? When will those who govern us respect the highest decisions of the administrative legal courts in France? After the cancellations of the 2018 to 2020 decrees and the suspension of the 2021 and 2022 ones, we hope that this time the Ministry of Ecology will give into it.
The hearing regarding the cancellation of the suspended decrees of 2021 is set for Monday 24 October; we will be there for the birds.
Translated from the French by Joely Justice