Law firm paid €15,000 to help Malta win trapping court case

The government has paid €15,000 to global law firm Stibbe to help it win an upcoming European court case over its decision to reintroduce finch trapping seasons.

It has also paid €495.60 in legal assistance fees to Maltese law firm CCX Advocates, owned by Leonard Caruana – a long-standing legal advisor on hunting and trapping legislation to successive administrations.  

Parliamentary secretary for animal rights Roderick Galdes told MaltaToday that the legal costs are coming out of revenue collected by the government through trapping special licence fees.

Data provided by the FKNK would certainly appear to back the government’s estimates – 1,584 people currently have a general trapping licence, each of whom would have had to pay an additional €20 every year for a special licence to trap either finches or song thrush and golden plover. This means that the government stands to earn €31,680 a year if every trapper applies for a special licence.  

“The Attorney General’s office is fully involved, and we are treating this case exactly like the spring hunting one,” Galdes said, referring to a previous ECJ case against Malta in 2009.  

Back then Jan Bouckaert – head of Stibbe’s planning and environmental group in Brussels – had been appointed by the European Hunting Federation (FACE) to assist Malta’s then-Attorney General, Silvio Camilleri, in the case.

The European Commission will be represented in this case by Maltese lawyer Ken Mifsud Bonnici and German lawyer Christoph Hermes, both legal advisors on environmental law.

Finch trapping is prohibited by the EU and was phased out in Malta in 2009, in line with its EU accession treaty. However, the Labour government in 2014 reintroduced the trapping of seven species of wild finches – on the assumption that it can justly derogate from EU law in a similar fashion to spring hunting. 

Indeed, its legal argument in the upcoming ECJ case will likely zero in on an article in the EU Birds Directive that allows EU member states to derogate from the ban “where there is no other satisfactory solution…to permit, under strictly supervised conditions and on a selective basis, the capture, keeping or other judicious use of certain birds in small numbers”. 

However, the European Commission has argued that the traditional Maltese use of clap nets is a non-selective trapping style, and that trapping birds for leisure does not constitute a “judicious” reason to derogate. 

BirdLife Malta intends to assist the EC in its case, but is finding it difficult to obtain crucial government data on trapping. 

“We have for several months been asking the Wild Birds Regulation Unit for the number of birds trapped, data that should be updated daily as it’s necessary for the government to find out if the quota has been reached and hence whether to prematurely close the season,” BirdLife Malta chief executive Mark Sultana told MaltaToday.

“We also need to know the locations of trapping sites – how many are in public and private land, farmland or garigue. However, the WBRU keeps telling us that they will provide the information in due time; they’re playing a game that raises eyebrows.”