A little birdie tells me there is something slightly premature in both the agony of hunters and the ecstasy of anti-hunters regarding last Thursday’s ruling by the European Courts of Justice in Luxembourg.
Already the decision to apply interim measures has been interpreted as the final curtain on hunting of all forms in Malta. Gun shops report a 95% drop in sales, pharmacies report a 95% increase in anti-depressant prescriptions… even the turtle-doves seem to have got themselves into a flap. Last Friday, BirdLife Malta reported “significant changes” in their behaviour. It seems they gathered in Mizieb in greater numbers than usual, and then headed off to an undisclosed location for an all-night, feather-fluffing and guano-dropping “Happy Bird Day” party (I am told it was at the Barumbara in Qrendi, but my little birdie refuses to confirm).

In any case, it’s nice to see the pigeons have something to coo about for a change, and far be it from me to rain on their migration… but much as I hate to have to point this out, the case against Malta has not actually been decided yet.
What the European Court of Justice did was enforce a temporary ban on spring hunting, applicable only to this season, to ensure that the Republic of Malta did not take any decision on an issue which is currently the subject of an ongoing case. And in a welcome break with FKNK tradition, this was explained fairly well by one of the hunters’ representatives themselves, Joe Buttigieg.
Imagine, the FKNK president argued on Smash TV last weekend, you had a case where ownership of a garage was disputed in court by two individuals, one of whom was using the garage as a warehouse. The court might conceivably issue an order for the latter to vacate the property, at least until any final decision is taken…
OK, so a few specimens of Homo advocatis might point out a gazillion legal pitfalls to the analogy, but the general principle is correct: interim measures only serve to stop an action for as long as its legality is being questioned in court.
What this in turn suggests is that the hunters’ representatives had clearly understood the implications of the decision before it was even taken. So… why are they now not explaining it to their members?

On Friday, FKNK issued a statement in reaction to the ECJ ruling, written with the federation’s usual combination of self-aggrandisement (“The FKNK on behalf of all its members, as also the entire hunting community and the public at large…”), patriotic indignation (“…the rights of all Maltese hunters and trappers to practise the sport which they have been practising since time immemorial”), and sheer conspiracy theory paranoia: “([We] cannot but conclude that the decision given today is the end result of the action taken by BirdLife [Malta]...).”
How strange, that the FKNK would not also point out aspects of the ruling which are of direct concern to the hunters themselves. Namely, this: “It cannot be ruled out from the outset that the main action (against Malta) is well founded even though, on the other hand, the arguments relied upon by the Republic of Malta in defending itself cannot be disregarded…”
Considering that the real procedures have scarcely yet begun, and that the ECJ itself suddenly seems to think Malta might actually have a case… why all the doom and gloom?
The ECJ ruling also points out what this and other newspapers have been saying for years: that while Malta does have the right to apply a derogation under Article 9 – all member states do, it comes with the directive – there is nonetheless a procedure that has to be followed for that derogation to actually be granted. This procedure was not observed in Malta’s case. The ruling says so itself: we didn’t supply sufficient information, and the meagre information we did supply did not add up to a valid enough reason to justify an exemption.
On the one hand, this merely illustrates what we all already knew anyway (i.e., that while the government had every intention to win the 2003 referendum, it had little interest in actually fighting for the right to hunt in spring.) But by the same token, one could argue that any future attempt to re-apply the derogation, made following regular procedure and supplying more detailed information, might yield a different outcome.

Of course, you could also reason (as BirdLife does) the other way round. The information supplied did not add up to a justification precisely because it was detailed and accurate; and as the ruling also reminds us, the whole point of the Wild Birds Directive is not to “guarantee hunting communities a minimum number of birds to be taken per hunter”.
But these are just arguments; in reality, the ultimate arbiter has yet to take a final decision.

Meanwhile, the hunters claim to have been deceived by everyone. They were misled by the previous administration of government, and many of them still possess signed letters by the former Prime Minister as proof. They were misled by the erstwhile Malta EU Information Centre, and many still own a copy of that infamous 2003 edition of Aggornat. But the fact of the matter is that the same hunters also deceived themselves; or at least, allowed themselves to be deceived by