One year after the appeal prepared by the Government (at the request of the animal welfare associations), the Constitutional Court, with a sentence of 4 December 2019, declared unfounded the question of legitimacy on the law of the Marche Region of 7 November 2018 which allowed hunters to record the slaughtered heads of migratory game with proven killing. The art. 2 of this law has in fact provided that "The hunter must write down, in the appropriate spaces of the personal card, the number of sedentary and migratory game heads after the ascertained killing".
According to the Court, this provision does not invade the exclusive state competence in the matter of protecting the environment and the ecosystem (there is no violation of Article 117 of the Constitution, i.e. the law does not conflict with national legislation - law 157 /ninety two). The judges specify that the concept of abatement used by paragraph 92-bis of art. 12 of the law n. 12/157 evidently refers only to the killing of the head of wild fauna, in accordance with the meaning that this term assumes in the more general system of the same law, also because it is the only one responding to the need to obtain certain data on the real extent of the fauna population.
"Having said that - the sentence continues - it should also be clarified that if the killing can well be perceived at the same time as the hunting act, however in all other cases of lack of evidence, its verification could require an assessment of the effective killing of the head of fauna that the hunter will have to carry out anyway - it should be specified - immediately after shooting. Thus interpreted - concludes the Constitutional Court -, the contested provision does not collide with the state one, which is indeed focused on the maximum timeliness of the annotation, but still in relation to an event that actually took place, consistently with the aforementioned purpose of allow monitoring based on genuine data about the consistency of the fauna population ".
According to the Council, therefore, in light of the purposes of acquiring reliable information, it cannot be considered that the state law obliges to note uncertain events "with the paradoxical effect, which is also contradictory with respect to the purpose of protecting wildlife, of providing data only hypothetical about its composition ". At this point one wonders why, once again, the Minister of the Environment continues to violate the regional provisions that are clearly evident in compliance with the same national and European regulations. Now it is necessary to reply, point by point, to this behavior as recently happened for Lombardy regarding the supply of live calls.