Region: Belgium

Humane Society International / Europe

Mark Von Holden/AP Images for the HSUS

BRUSSELS— Today, the European Parliament approved the revised Environment Crime Directive, strengthening the EU’s approach to addressing environmental crime. This decision, endorsing the compromise agreement reached between the Council of the European Union and the European Commission in November 2023, marks a significant step towards better protecting wildlife and habitats. The updated legislation equips authorities with enhanced tools to tackle serious environmental offenses and deter criminals, including wildlife traffickers. Humane Society International/Europe welcomes the European Parliament’s adoption of the revised Environment Crime Directive as a positive step to ensure better protection of wildlife and the environment.

Environmental crime stands as the third most lucrative organised criminal activities in the world, growing at a rate of  . It contributes significantly to biodiversity loss, increases the risk of zoonotic diseases, and has serious negative socio-economic impacts, particularly in countries where animals and wildlife products are sourced. Despite its considerable profitability, detecting, prosecuting and penalizing environmental crime offenses has proven to be  challenging.

A 2019-2020 evaluation revealed that the effectiveness of the initial EU Directive (2008) addressing environmental protection via criminal law was limited. Few cases resulted in sentences, imposed sanctions were too low to deter criminals, and cross-border cooperation was not consistently occurring. Recognising these shortcomings, the European Commission presented in 2021 a proposal aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of the Directive.

Dr Joanna Swabe, senior director of public affairs for Humane Society International/Europe, said:

“The revised Environmental Crime Directive, although not perfect, does respond to societal demands for environmental crime to be taken more seriously. The legislation will now allow more stringent penalties to be imposed on those who commit the most serious criminal offences against the environment, and will hopefully serve as a deterrent to all those considering partaking in crimes against animals, such as wildlife trafficking. We also warmly welcome the fact that underwater noise pollution has been included in the list of criminal offences. This poses a significant threat to the welfare of marine mammals, especially cetaceans, since it disrupts their ability to communicate and navigate properly. We are glad that this threat to marine wildlife has been recognised.”

Over the past few years, HSI/Europe has worked closely with other animal and environmental protection organisations to ensure that the EU legislation on environmental crime, which was originally passed in 2008, was significantly strengthened. Amongst other things, the revised Environmental Crime Directive now:

  • Introduces common sanction levels for both natural and legal persons.
  • Provides a far more comprehensive list of environmental offences to be criminalised in Member States than in the original legislation, although fails to include one the most lucrative environmental crimes, namely illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
  • Includes Annex C species of the EU Wildlife Trade Regulations, thereby broadening the scope of the Directive to cover, for example, threatened endemic species.
  • Offers additional tools for national prosecutors through legal guidance and national strategies.
  • While stopping short of using the term ecocide, it introduces a “qualified offence” for the most serious environmental crimes, which cause widespread and substantial damage to the environment that could be irreversible or long-lasting.
  • Enables the involvement of civil society organisations and ordinary citizens to help combat environmental offenses, effectively asserting their legitimacy in exposing environmental crimes and marking a first step toward protecting them from intimidation or litigation when reporting such crimes or assisting investigations.
  • Strengthens data collection provisions to assist Member States’ reporting practices.
  • Recognises the need for enhanced specialisation, training and resources for competent enforcement and judicial authorities.

Media contact: Yavor Gechev, communications director for HSI/Europe, ygechev@hsi.org ; +359889468098 ; +393515266629

Humane Society International / Belgium

HSI

BRUSSELS—Animal protection charity Humane Society International/Europe strongly condemns Denmark’s plan to import 10,000 mink from Iceland, Norway, Spain, Poland and Finland to start a new breeding programme for fur farms once the country’s temporary mink breeding and farming ban is lifted from Jan. 1, 2023. Only around 1% of Danish fur farmers (14 out of more than 1,200 mink farm companies) applied for State Aid to re-start business if the temporary ban was lifted.

Two years ago, all Danish mink farms were shut down on government order and the animals were gassed to death following the discovery that a mink variant of the coronavirus could be transmitted to humans, and that hundreds of SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks had been recorded on mink farms across Europe. It remains unclear how the imported animals will be health screened, and if a solution is not in place in time, all the animals could potentially be killed upon arrival.

Dr Joanna Swabe, senior director of public affairs at HSI/Europe, commented: “It is contemptible that 10,000 mink are to be transported to Denmark, including 2,000 animals currently being shipped from Iceland across rough winter seas, to refill the barren wire cages on a handful of Danish fur farms whose owners decided to continue profiting quite literally off the backs of defenceless animals. This is happening as across the EU, more than one million people so far have signed an official petition calling for an end to all fur farming. Mink farms are a ticking time bomb for disease risk, and we urge both the competent national authorities and the European Commission to closely scrutinise any mass movement of potentially infectious animals, as well as act to shut down the fur trade before it delivers the next pandemic.”

With consumers and designers alike increasingly rejecting fur, the industry has been in financial decline for years. The pandemic compounded this decline, hastening the closure of fur farms in the Netherlands and the introduction of bans in several other EU countries. However, SARS-CoV-2 continues to pose a threat to public health for as long as the factory farming of mink—a species highly susceptible to this virus and a source of viral mutations—is allowed to take place.

Although Danish authorities have given the green light for fur production to resume, there is growing public support for a total ban on fur farming. Indeed, Denmark was one of the first EU Member States to reach the national threshold for signatures for the European Citizens’ Initiative for a Fur-Free Europe, which calls for a ban on all fur farming across the European Union. After just seven months, this petition has amassed more than 1.1 million signatures.

Background information on fur farming:

  • More than 100 million animals are killed for their fur every year worldwide—that is equivalent to three animals dying every second, just for their fur.
  • Fur farming has been banned in 19 European countries, including Malta, Ireland, Estonia, France, Italy and most recently Latvia on Sept. 22, 2022. Political discussions on a ban are also underway in Romania, Lithuania, Spain and Poland. A further two countries (Switzerland and Germany) have implemented such strict regulations that fur farming has effectively ended, and three other countries (Denmark, Sweden and Hungary) have imposed measures that have ended the farming of certain species. Mink farming is also being phased out in the Canadian province of British Colombia. The UK was the first country in the world to ban fur farming, in 2003.
  • Outbreaks of COVID-19 have been documented on over 480 mink fur farms in 12 different countries in Europe and North America since April 2020.
  • Fur also comes with a hefty environmental price tag including C02 emissions from intensively farming carnivorous animals and the manure runoff into lakes and rivers. A cocktail of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, such as chromium and formaldehyde, is used to preserve the fur and skin to stop it from rotting.
  • An increasing number of fashion designers and retailers are dropping fur cruelty. In the last few years alone, Moncler, Dolce & Gabbana, Canada Goose, Oscar de la Renta, Valentino, Gucci, Burberry, Versace, Chanel, Prada and other high-profile brands have announced fur-free policies.

ENDS

Media Contact: Yavor Gechev, communications director for HSI/Europe: ygechev@hsi.org

HSI/Europe delivers 48,226 signatures calling for EU action against hunting trophy imports

Humane Society International / Europe

Hélène Terlinden, BOLDT

BRUSSELS—Yesterday, Humane Society International/Europe handed a petition signed by nearly 50,000 citizens from all over the world to the European Parliament’s Committee on Petitions, urging the EU to take action against the trade in hunting trophies. The petition offers concrete interim policy recommendations to strengthen existing EU rules regarding the import and export of hunting trophies.

Iconic species like lions, rhinos and elephants are killed for their parts and shipped to and from the EU, earning the EU the sad title of the second-largest importer of animal trophies in the world. It makes the European Parliament well placed to address the repeated failure of the EU to properly implement existing regulatory protections.

Dr Joanna Swabe, senior director of public affairs for Humane Society International/Europe, said:

“We greatly appreciated the chance to be able to use our speaking time in the Committee on Petitions to counter the European Commission’s contentious and hackneyed claims—in response to our petition—that ‘well-regulated’ trophy hunting has benefits for both wildlife conservation and the livelihoods of local communities. It is unfortunate that they have swallowed the Kool-Aid predictably served up by apologists for trophy hunting, rather than evaluating the mounting evidence that killing threatened and endangered species for sport is harmful to species’ conservation and can actually contribute to increasing wealth inequalities, rather than benefiting all members of local communities. We are disappointed that even the recently adopted revised EU Action Plan on Wildlife Trafficking also listed ‘well-managed trophy hunting’ as a form of sustainable form of income. We strongly contest this characterisation.”

While critical of this attitude, HSI/Europe still welcomes the recent commitment in the revised EU Action Plan on Wildlife Trafficking to apply greater scrutiny to imports of hunting trophies and be more transparent about decision-making concerning country-species combinations. The action plan also states that the Commission will consider extending the EU legal requirement for hunting trophies to be accompanied by import permits for more species. Such import permits provide the EU with important oversight over the imports’ compliance with regional and international laws that aim to protect species from overexploitation through trade. At present, the EU requirement for an import permit for hunting trophies only applies to species in Annex A of the EU Wildlife Trade Regulation and six additional species listed in Annex B: the African elephant, common hippopotamus, African lion, southern white rhinoceros, polar bear and Argali sheep.

While HSI/Europe welcomes this change as an interim step, the ultimate goal for the EU is to work quickly to restrict all hunting trophy imports of regulated species. It is a vital step to curb the demand for imperilled species’ parts and products, as well as for protecting animals like giraffes, polar bears and cougars from the compounding, extensive consequences of this cruel practice.

Last month, in its Resolution on the EU’s strategic objectives for the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species COP19, the European Parliament urged the Commission and the Member States to “take immediate effective action in the framework of its commitments outlined in the EU biodiversity strategy to ban the import of hunting trophies derived from CITES-listed species.”

HSI/Europe’s petition to the European Parliament—as well as recent public opinion polls and our various submissions to Commission stakeholder consultations—highlights not only the urgent welfare, conservation and biological needs for these additional trade protections, but also the general public’s desire for the EU government to take immediate action to ban hunting trophy imports in line with a precautionary approach to species protection.

FACTS

  • Petition No 0976/2021 on the necessity for EU action with regard to trophy hunting was submitted to the European Parliament in September 2021.
  • The EU is the second-largest importer of animal trophies in the world, according to HSI/Europe’s report Trophy Hunting by the Numbers. Between 2016 and 2018, the EU was the largest importer of lion trophies globally. Trophies from at least 15,000 internationally protected mammals from 73 CITES-listed species were legally imported to the EU between 2014 and 2018, with a nearly 40% increase in trophy imports to the EU during this period.
  • Legally obtained hunting trophies of the species listed under Annex A and six species under Annex B of the EU Wildlife Trade Regulation can only be imported into the EU after a Member State has issued an import permit and verified that such imports have been legally acquired and will not be detrimental to the conservation of the species. There is no transparent process for the issuance of such permits and non-detriment findings. Hunting trophies of all other species are exempted from this rule.
  • As outlined in a recent report calling for a revision of the trophy hunting regime in the European Union, there is a long history of a lack of proper regulation and oversight when it comes to trade in hunting trophies. Even where trophy hunting is legal and follows management guidelines, there is evidence of population declines, indirect negative effects on populations, biologically unsustainable quotas, offtake of restricted individuals like breeding females and cubs, poor population estimates and monitoring, quotas assigned at the incorrect spatial scale, significant animal welfare concerns and a lack of transparency in data and policy and management decisions. A comprehensive ban on the import of hunting trophies of regulated species is a necessary precautionary approach to protect imperilled species.
  • Various studies have found that trophy hunting does not provide meaningful employment opportunities or revenues for the majority of community members and can instead contribute to wealth inequalities. Community-based natural resource management approaches should not make the poor poorer and the rich richer and should instead focus on more ethical, sustainable and lucrative industry alternatives to trophy hunting.

ENDS

Media contact: Adeline Fischer, communications senior manager: afischer@hsi.org ; +49 17631063219

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