Update 3pm
The Spring hunting season for quail will open on Wednesday after a court rejected BirdLife's eleventh-hour request to stop it.
In a statement hours after the injunction was thrown out, the government announced a legal notice to open the season with a national quota set for 2,400 quails.
The hunting of quail will be allowed from two hours before sunrise to noon until April 30. A separate notice will be issued to allow the hunting of 1,500 turtledove from April 17 to April 30, the government said.
Earlier a judge rejected the request for an injunction, noting that the NGO had already tried – and failed – to block spring hunting on similar grounds in 2022 and 2023.
Given that there was “no change in circumstances”, Mr Justice Francesco Depasquale ruled that there was no reason to uphold the request, saying Birdlife appeared to be “forum shopping” – a term used to describe the practice of filing the same case before different judges, in the hope of obtaining a favourable judgment.
He also revoked a warrant which had been provisionally upheld while Birdlife’s application was being considered.
Birdlife sought to convince the courts that authorities should not follow the advice of its advisory Ornis Committee, which last week voted in favour of allowing spring hunting for quail and turtle dove. The committee advised the government to allow quail hunting between April 10 and 30 and hunting of turtle dove between April 17 and 30.
In its judgement, the court chastised Birdlife for having filed the case before a different court to the one hearing its objections to a 2022 legal notice. If anything, the NGO ought to have flagged the matter before that court which is knowledgeable of the full facts, the court said.
It was “difficult” to link the alleged decline in turtle dove populations to the spring hunting season, the court said, given that the season was only open for a few weeks and Malta was "nothing but a rock in the large Mediterranean Sea. "Furthermore, the court noted, the hunting quota was set at a maximum of 1,500 birds over that 14-day span.
The court expected BirdLife to produce documents proving "a substantial change in circumstances" that would have led the court to depart from previous decisions over the same injunction request.
But all documents put together did not show that anything had changed in such manner as to convince the court to decide differently to what other courts before it had done.
Lawyer Martin Farrugia assisted Birdlife. Lawyers Charlene Muscat and Anthony Borg represented the respondent authorities except for ERA that was represented by lawyer Paula Axiak. Lawyer Kathleen Calleja Grima represented FKNK.
In a statement later, hunting group Kaċċaturi San Ubertu (KSU), described BirdLife Malta's case as an "extremist" attempt to deny Malta's right to apply a derogation to hunt in spring.
It said the right was endorsed by the European Court of Justice, by the majority vote in a 2015 referendum on spring hunting and government's electoral mandate.
"It is nothing but vile for extremists to persist in abusing and wasting the time of our courts following two similar court decisions that threw out Birdlife Malta's warped arguments, as also did a referendum," they said.