Joint animal-environmentalist action
With a joint letter to the European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevičius and the Directorate-General for the Environment European Commission, the Enpa, Lac, Lav, Legambiente, Lipu-BirdLife Italia and WWF Italia associations have sent a "horizontal" complaint for violation, by Italy, of the Birds Directive on hunting and, moreover, of Regulation 2021/57 of the European Commission on the ban on the use of lead ammunition in wetlands. "Despite the numerous EU disputes on hunting - the associations declare - which have led to infringement procedures, convictions by the Court of Justice, regulatory adjustments, new procedures and Pilot investigations, Italy continues to violate, in law and in fact, the Birds Directive especially in the areas for which it has received clear alerts from the European institutions".
Opinions and prescriptions
This is the case of bird hunting during the pre-nuptial migration period, a biological phase of extreme importance for the conservation of species and populations, in which, not surprisingly, hunting is strictly prohibited. Nonetheless, for years the hunting calendars have continued to allow bird hunting in these periods, disregarding the rules, the opinions of Ispra and the European prescriptions. The same is the case of hunting carried out on species in an unfavorable conservation status in the absence of adequate management plans or in the presence of management plans ineffectively applied, as in the case of the skylark, the wild dove and the rock partridge, whose plans are completely unimplemented except in the parts that allow the collection of the species.
The poaching situation
Furthermore, the situation of poaching is considered dramatic, with the almost total failure of the National Plan to stop criminals, the approval of which had led to the closure of the investigation opened by the European Commission, and the succession of serious acts of poaching, of which we notified the European authorities. "The volume and quality of the infringements committed by Italy against European law - continue Enpa, Lac, Lav, Legambiente, Lipu-BirdLife Italia and WWF Italia - are such as to make the opening of a new overall infringement procedure inevitable against a hunting regime, such as the Italian one, macroscopically and structurally illegal and, unfortunately, favored by the condescension of many national and regional administrations”.
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