On Tuesday 10th November, Birdlife published its new Report on “Derogations from the protection of birds under the EU Birds Directive, the Bern Convention and the African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement (AEWA)”, which sheds light on the controversial process of issuing tens of thousands of licenses over a period of 8 years to kill at least 14 million birds.
Exceptions to the obligations of the Bern Convention may be made only with recourse to Article 9(1) of the Convention which entitles Contracting Parties with the right to provide licenses to kill a limited number of a species in certain exceptional cases such as when there is a threat to human life or mass negative effect on another species or habitat, and by proving that other non-lethal methods have failed.
The problem, as mentioned in the report which has also been referred to as the “License to Kill” report, is twofold: firstly, that Contracting Parties are often issuing licenses without abandon and with little regard for the effects on the species and wider biodiversity, and secondly, that Parties are frequently failing to report on these exceptions, or are reporting incorrectly.
The Bern Convention takes this issue very seriously and will aim to address it in the future within the biennial reporting and the Group of Experts on Eradication of Illegal Killing, Trapping and Trade of Wild Birds.
You can find links to the summary and long version of the report on the Birdlife Webpage.
Also, here is a link to the Bern Convention’s Campaign of 2017 “the Last Tweet” on the illegal killing of birds.
