The European Court of Justice will await a report by one of its attorney generals before deciding the case against Malta over the violation of a ban on bird trapping.
At the end of the final hearing of the case on Thursday, the ECJ said it had requested an expert opinion by Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta which is expected to be delivered on May 30, Birdlife said in a post on its Facebook page.
The European Court of Justice will subsequently deliver its final judgement.
The controversial practice of trapping protected finches using cages and nets was effectively banned by the European Court of Justice in 2018.
But in 2020, the government went ahead and opened the season anyway, claiming it was for a scientific study to ring birds and release them. For some years now trappers have been participating in this catch-and-release ‘study’.
Activists have slammed the so-called research, with the Committee Against Bird Slaughter calling it "poaching under the cover of pseudo-science".
Proceedings against Malta on finch trapping were initiated in December 2020 with a Letter of Formal Notice sent by the European Commission, followed up by a reasoned opinion and finally a fully-fledged court case which was filed in January last year.
Birdlife said that a date when the final ECJ judgment would be delivered is as yet unknown. In a previous case against Malta it had taken nearly a year for the ECJ verdict to be delivered after the expert opinion was filed.
In that case, the Advocate General’s opinion was issued in July 2017 while the landmark ECJ judgment that found Malta guilty of infringing the European Birds Directive when it allowed finch trapping to reopen had been delivered in June 2018.
Earlier this week, Birdlife said it had collected evidence from finch trapping sites showing "rampant abuse of a smokescreen scientific research derogation".
The NGO said that with over 2,600 registered trapping sites for finches last autumn, fieldwork carried out by its members had revealed that an even greater number of trapping sites were operating illegally, with some becoming registered with the Wild Birds Regulation Unit (WBRU) after reports were filed with police.
BirdLife Malta's Head of Conservation, Nicholas Barbara, estimated a minimum of 51,400 finches have been trapped from permitted sites and taken into captivity without being released.
"From what we witnessed, trappers managed to catch around 65% of the birds that landed on a trapping site, with the remainder managing to escape. In all cases of caught birds, however, these were never released. This is a far cry from any scientific research activity which the derogation is supposedly aimed for," Barbara noted.
BirdLife claims that even if a bird caught by a trapper was released, the likelihood that this same bird would be caught again in another trapping site is high.
The hunters' association Kaċċaturi San Ubertu accused BirdLife Malta of 'blatant deceit', asking it to substantiate its allegation about 51,000 trapped birds and accusing it of trying to influence the European Court just before the final hearing.