EXCESSIVE GAME BIRD RELEASES

 THE CONTINUED RELEASE OF GAME BIRDS

My views are expressed in these first few lines. Again the power of those entitled to know they can do what they want is indicated in Wild Justice’s Newsletter. There seems to be not enough is ever done by those in power and it is necessary to keep attacking the ‘establishment’. So, congratulations and well done to Wild Justice.

(https://wild justice.org.uk)

WILD JUSTICE’s last newsletter makes two main points. In the last week, Wild Justice has sent two formal legal letters to DEFRA. These are known as PAP letters, where PAP stands for Pre-action Protocol.  They are the beginning, potentially, of full-blown legal actions where we would seek judicial reviews of two government decisions.  The purpose of the PAP letters is to lay out the legal cases and see what the other side, in this case DEFRA, says.

Case 1: this is revisiting our challenge to the legality of large-scale gamebird releases on or near sites of high conservation importance (see here and here). We are revisiting it because we do not consider that DEFRA has done what it told the court it would do when we agreed to end our case on this matter last October, and it certainly has not done enough to protect the environment from damage by released non-native gamebirds.

 

Wild Justice submits that the the general licence (GL43) that DEFRA has issued is unlawful in that DEFRA is 'permitting and licensing the release of gamebirds within European sites and within 500m of European sites, without having properly ruled out the risk of harm of the release of gamebirds in the numbers, densities, and locations permitted under GL43, and has failed to take the necessary steps to prevent the deterioration of European sites.'.

 

Hundreds of subscribers to this newsletter responded to the public consultation which closed in mid-March but we see no sign that DEFRA took any notice at all of your views, and we believe that their proposals are unlawful. That's what we have told them and that's why we are starting this challenge.  We think that is what you would want us to do.