EU: COURT JUSTICE IMPOSES LOMBARDY SUSPENSION HUNTING IN FRINGUELLI
The finches of Lombardy and together with their brambles, frosoni and pipits, can rest assured: they can return to come out of their nests without the risk of being shot.
The EU Court of Justice intervened to help them with an order which ordered Italy to suspend the hunts of protected birds such as finch, bramble, frosone and pipit, authorized in this hunting season by the Lombardy Region with regional law 21 of 16. / 9/2009, pending the conclusion of the appeal of the EU Commission against the hunting derogations of Lombardy and other regions already started in December 2008.
The EU Commission, which had appealed to the Luxembourg Court of Justice, affirms that "any bird hunted in a manner that does not comply with Directive 79/409 constitutes serious and irreparable damage to the fauna, in particular ornithological, of the European Union".
In the matter of fauna, the Commission had resorted to this extreme possibility of the urgent suspension request only three times: in April 2008 in the case of a law that allowed the hunting of birds in the spring season in Malta (see IP / 08/647) , in March 2007 for the proposal to build a road crossing the Rospuda river valley in Poland (see IP / 07/369) and in December 2006 for the derogations concerning hunting in the Liguria region in violation of the wild birds directive ". For the LAC (League for the abolition of hunting) "the reiterated illegal policy of the Lombardy Regional Council has been fully disavowed, which for years has opened hunting in derogation to protected species both nationally and by the 1979 Community directive on the protection of 'avifauna ".
Source: ASCA