A few weeks ago the Regional Administrative Court for Umbria issued a sentence on the appeal filed against theAtc Perugia 1 with which the cancellation of the wild boar management plan for the 2018/19 hunting season was requested. Perhaps not everyone will remember the story: numerous hunters and teams of hunters, with the intervention ad adiuvandum of Federcaccia Umbria and the formal one of Free Hunting, had challenged the Management Plan and related Plan for the slaughter of the wild boar species of the 2018/2019 hunting season proposed by the Atc Pg1 and approved in the Umbria Region because, according to the numerous applicants and the expert who drew up the report brought to court, in essence, the plan would have assigned objectives of effectively impossible abatements (even three times the number of previous years) to the point of making the failure to achieve substantially certain and therefore certain the obligation for enthusiasts to have to pay their damage to agriculture that the ATC would not have been able to cover with regional funds.
In addition, to aggravate the matter, again in the opinion of the applicants and the expert opinion, the failure to achieve the expected objectives would also be the result of failure or inadequate implementation of suitable hunting policies by the ATC itself. The appeal was made immediately after the approval of the 2018/2019 Plan and at the end of the season the numbers achieved confirm the provisions of the appeals: very high percentages of non-fulfillment with respect to the abatement targets, to the point that in the following season not only teams that could not be admitted are admitted, because they had not even reached the minimum limit of one third, but requests for extra budget damages are promptly issued to all hunters who diligently, feeling obliged, just as punctually they respond by pouring.
The hearing on the merits in court, however, is held as very often happens in Italy long after, only at the end of 2020, and what does the sentence a few days ago say? Attention. It does not say that the Atc PG1 is right. He says the court believes it cannot judge the problem raised by hunters, hunting associations and the expert. And the reasons for which he affirms it are as clear as they cannot be shared but, above all, they are unrelated to the matter of merit. on the management of the hunting policy. One of these reasons is that the 2018/2019 season is now over and for the court for this reason the 2018 abatement plan would have exhausted its effects in the past and therefore the matter of the dispute ceased and the applicants would no longer have any interest in having a pronunciation.
But actually the effects have not ceased because the applicants would still like to see the sums paid back, in their opinion unfairly, for the damages not covered by the regional funds. The ruling also states that in any case the court could not have ruled on the merits because the many recurring hunters would have to pay not equally, but according to the famous failure to achieve goals. In reality, even this is not true, because all the hunters asked to have the contested plan canceled and returned all the sums they were forced to pay without making any difference between them.
Moreover, these simple clarifications to the reasons indicated by the court had been indicated in the very last defenses of the hunters and of Hunting Federation, which the court decided not to consider because they were filed at around 16.00 instead of 12.00 on the last day, not taking into account that according to known jurisprudence the time limit is not so relevant as to remove an act from a proceeding in addition to the the fact above all that being general principles and already identifiable in the deeds of two years of proceedings there was no need to find them necessarily even in the last of the replies of the numerous applicants in order to affirm or simply evaluate them.
This is the news, but now relevant political aspects come into play. At the outcome of the sentence, the president of the ATC PG1 was quick to issue a statement to the online newspaper "Perugia Today" that "this sentence confirms how ATC Perugia 1 has always acted in compliance with current regulations on the matter by correctly applying both the provisions of the regional regulation governing the hunting of wild boar species (Rr number 34 of 1999 and subsequent amendments), and the provisions of the regional law of Umbria number 17 of 2009 'Rules for the implementation of the fund regional for the prevention and compensation of damage caused to agricultural production by wildlife and wild animals and by hunting and the consequent Regional implementation regulation number 5 of 2010"In reality, as we have explained, the sentence does not enter into the merits and does not confirm the goodness of the work of the ATC. The ruling only explains why it believes it does not have to address the issue. Which is a very different thing from the one advocated by President Cruciani.
For this reason, the applicants are considering going to the Council of State to obtain a ruling on the merits. But the story is not over yet: the icing on the cake, Friday 4 December evening the AtcPG1 through its defender has beware of all hunters and Federcaccia to pay the judicial expenses within 15 days, that is on the Immaculate Conception and at Christmas, threatening the recourse to judicial means for the recovery of the sums with a further increase in expenses. The problem of the management of the hunting policy and of the treatment and consideration reserved for hunters speaks for itself.
Even without having to bother with the inappropriateness of the initiatives for reasons of economic and social difficulty that the territory is also experiencing in these pre-Christmas days due to the restrictive measures linked to the containment of the pandemic, which still exist, the hunters actually represent an authentic and precious instrument for implementing the hunting policy of the territory that cannot be limited only to the see them as free lenders or sources of income, as the case may be. Time to clarify, therefore, but it is also time to see a turning point not only judicial but also political. A political turning point on the territory in which the Region, the new Region, can and must take a position for effective protection of the environment, agriculture, hunting, hunters, citizens even in our territories.