FROM WILD JUSTICE — THEY WIN IN COURT AGAINST NATURAL ENGLAND

Good morning… ...and good news! Today we bring you a brief newsletter, letting you know we were successful in fighting off Natural England’s attempt to hike up the adverse costs for our ongoing joint legal challenge (with our friends at Badger Trust) against 26 supplementary Badger cull licences. Last year, Natural England (NE) applied to increase the adverse costs cap (what you pay if you lose a case) for our legal costs on this case. Instead of the standard £10,000 adverse costs cap, provided for by the Aarhus Convention which protects citizens’ access to justice on environmental claims, NE asked the court to increase the costs to £20,000 for Wild Justice and £30,000 for Badger Trust. We saw this as an aggressive attempt by NE to price us out of taking legal action. Last Thursday (16 October) at the High Court in London, Mr Justice Fordham heard evidence from both sides. Natural England argued that we (Wild Justice and Badger Trust) could use our cash reserves to cover any increase in adverse costs should we lose the case. We argued that, for both groups, our only source of funding comes from donations, and that any cash we do have is used for daily running costs, and in Wild Justice’s case, other legal challenges, research and campaigning work. After a full day in court, Mr Justice Fordham rejected Natural England’s application to increase our adverse costs, so they remain at £10,000 each for us and for Badger Trust. The judge’s written reasoning for dismissing NE’s application is set to follow in due course. We’re grateful to our fantastic legal team for their ongoing hard work on this case: Carol Day, Ricardo Gama, Julia Eriksen, Madeeha Akhtar (Leigh Day), Barney McCay (Landmark Chambers) and David Wolfe KC (Matrix Chambers). We can only assume this whole sorry process was an attempt by NE to dissuade us from challenging the potential unlawfulness of their decisions when it comes to Badger culls. Needless to say, we won’t be intimidated. We’re delighted that Natural England’s bid to make our legal challenge prohibitively expensive has failed, and now we can focus on the more important topic at hand – Badgers. We maintain our position that 26 supplementary Badger culling licences were granted unlawfully, against the advice of NE’s own scientific advisors (click here to read about it). The substantive hearing for our legal challenge will take place at the High Court on 16-17 December 2025. You can read the full press release about our success at the costs hearing here. More soon – for now, we’ll leave you with a quote from Chris: “This was a calculated attempt to block grass roots groups from accessing environmental justice on account of affordability. Cynical, anti-democratic and bullying...Natural England should be ashamed of themselves”. ~Chris Packham, Co-Director, Wild Justice Thank you, Wild Justice (CEO: Bob Elliot. Directors: Chris Packham and Ruth Tingay). This is the 254th Wild Justice newsletter. This email was sent to you because you subscribed to it through the Wild Justice website or through an e-action or a petition where you ticked a box. Thank you. We will only use your personal details to send you the Wild Justice newsletter. We will not give or sell your details to anyone else. You can unsubscribe at any time: there is an unsubscribe button at the foot of this email or you can reply to this email and ask us to remove you from the list (the former will happen immediately, the latter might take a few days). 124, City Road London Greater London EC1V 2NX UNITED KINGDOM Unsubscribe | Change Subscriber Options