A country held hostage, again

Robert Abela made some very good decisions in his first three weeks in office, but he made some bad ones too. The decision to keep the hunting regulator under the responsibility of a hunter minister was one of the bad ones.

We had been hearing rumours that the Wild Birds Regulation Unit (WBRU) would remain under the portfolio of Clint Camilleri, and we have become accustomed to governments who are too scared of losing the hunters’ vote, but the decision to place the unit under a ministry that has no relation whatsoever to the sector simply takes the cake.

Clint Camilleri was responsible for the WBRU during the last legislature, when he was Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture and Animal Rights, reporting directly to the Environment Minister. Camilleri was given his own ministry in Abela’s Cabinet – he was initially appointed Minister for for Agriculture, Fisheries, Animal Rights, and Consumer Protection. Five days later the situation changed. Justyne Caruana resigned as Gozo Minister and Camilleri got her job.

At the time, the government was still discussing ministerial portfolios and it was expected that the WBRU would either be given to Environment Minister Aaron Farrugia or to Anton Refalo, who had, by then, replaced Camilleri as animal rights minister.

But no, the Prime Minister, probably because he did not want to rock the boat and upset the strong hunting lobby, decided that Camilleri would keep the WBRU under his wing.

The decision led to outcry from animal rights groups, chief among them Birdlife Malta. The organisation has had a rocky relationship with Camilleri – it has accused the minister, who is also a hunter, of failing to step up enforcement to tackle illegalities in the field. It had said, right from the onset that the minister responsible for hunting cannot be a hunter – the minister has to seek a balance and ensure that the laws are upheld but cannot be seen to be doing that when he is part of the hunting lobby.

There are other issues, legal ones. Birdlife is challenging Abela’s move in court on the basis that national and European law say that the Environment Minister should be responsible for the hunting sector, not any other minister. It seems that the PM’s decision was not thought through.

Our position on hunting has been clear and consistent: we are against all forms of hunting and trapping, sustainable or not. We expressed that position clearly in 2015, when Malta held a referendum on spring hunting, and our position has not changed.

How could it have changed when Malta experienced such rampant hunting illegalities over the past few years? Everyone remembers how, at one point, things had become so bad that then PM Joseph Muscat had closed the hunting season early. Yet the measure was only a temporary one – it was ‘back to business’ as usual a few months later.

Despite the atrocities, enforcement remains miserably inadequate. The officers at the Administrative Law Enforcement unit are very good at their job, but there are simply not enough of them. And the punishments meted out by the courts, although slightly better than what they were before, are still not an effective enough deterrent.

We truly hope that things will improve, but the truth is that the decision to place the hunting regulator under the same person again, under a hunter whose ministerial portfolio has nothing to do with hunting in the first place, does not inspire much confidence.