EU to tell Muscat to ban trapping or face court

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat will be receiving a ‘reasoned opinion’ from the European Commission, informing him specifically why his decision to reopen the trapping season is in breach of EU law.

Commission sources who spoke to MaltaToday said the reasoned opinion was to be communicated within the next weeks.

Muscat will be given two months to comply with the reasoned opinion, which comes eight months after the government received a formal complaint in October 2014 for opening the season.

If the Maltese government refuses to comply with the EU, the Commission may ask the Court of Justice to start litigation procedures against Malta. Muscat can be expected to be advised by his legal team not to go to the ECJ over the matter and comply with the request to close the season.

Muscat chose to reopen the trapping season despite the season having long been phased out following Malta’s accession to the EU. Trapping is prohibited by the Birds Directive.

The reopening of the trapping season allowed the capture of seven wild songbirds which migrate over Malta in the autumn. The species are the linnet, the greenfinch, the chaffinch, the serin, the goldfinch, the hawfinch and the siskin.

Maltese trappers trap finches by using clap nets and live decoy birds. The age-old tradition is practised by over 4,000 individuals. Most of the clap traps are in fact located on public land.

The accession negotiations with the European Union determined that Malta could allow for the temporary capture of finches for four years after accession in 2004.  This was applicable only for those trappers who had been in possession of a trapping licence. The concession was withdrawn after the 2008 season, when trapping became illegal.

During the 2002 negotiations with the EU, the Nationalist administration presented the EC with the precise total number of trappers who had a licence – but that year, most trappers did not have a licence and no title over land, prompting a scramble to have thousands of trappers regularised.

Notable was the sudden appearance of hundreds of trappers from Gozo who previously were never registered as such.

Though Muscat had made no electoral pledge to reopen bird trapping, he decided to introduce the practice last year as a clear sop to the hunting and trapping lobby. In doing so he reopened an old environmental wound and ignored the guidelines for those in possession of a trapping licence. 

The new trapping licences should have been reserved to those who had been in possession of a trapping licence in 2004. But this does not appear to have been the case this time round and new trappers were allowed to register.

On becoming Environment Commissioner, former tourism minister Karmenu Vella had told Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder that the EC had already initiated formal infringement proceedings against Malta over the Maltese government’s decision to derogate from the ban on the trapping of seven species of wild finches.

The first letter of formal notice was issued on 16 October, 2014, inviting Malta to submit its observations on the matter within one month of receipt of this letter.

On 16 October, 2014, the Commission wrote to the Maltese government asking it to reconsider its decision to resume traditional finch trapping, but on 20 October the government decided to go ahead and open the finch trapping season.