French hunters make a bird's life hell

The country sports lobby in Britain may be on the defensive in the face of a parliamentary majority in favour of banning foxhunting, but not so in France. France's 1.6 million shooting fraternity persuaded the National Assembly last week to extend the shooting season in open defiance of the European Union's oldest piece of nature conservation legislation, the 1979 Wild Birds Directive.

France already has by far the longest season in the EU. Shooting of some species is allowed for up to 71/2 months. And it's not as if they didn't know what they were doing - on Wednesday the Commission lodged an application with the European Court to fine France £70,000 a day, until it complies, for its continued failure to enforce a 1988 court ruling arising from the breach of another section of the directive.

It requires member-states to prohibit the deliberate destruction of nests and eggs of specified birds as well as associated activities such as the trade in live or dead birds.

The fine is calculated on the basis of a complicated standard formula that factors in a country's ability to pay and the seriousness and duration of the breach - in this case since 1993 when the power to fine member-states was granted under the Maastricht Treaty. And it is likely to be followed by a second fine when the court gets to consider the effects of last week's 92-20 vote by deputies, a tediously slow process also set in train by the Commission on Wednesday.

Conservationists argue that the preservation of bird species is threatened if they are shot while their young are still in the nest, wholly dependent on them, or once their migration season starts.

The new French legislation will allow departments to open the season for shooting water birds as early as July 15th, a full month before all other member states. In the case, for example, of surface-feeding ducks and coots, the Loire-Atlantique department allows them to be shot two to three weeks before the young have flown.

The French close of the hunting season is also a month later than throughout the rest of the EU, creating significant overlaps with the migration period. For 13 out 51 huntable migratory species, the Commission says the close of season is as much as four weeks after migration begins. Proposed by conservatives, the French legislation opened a bitter split in the Socialist-led majority, with Socialists and Communists lining up with the right against Greens.

The Green Party leader, Ms Dominique Voynet, France's Environment Minister, harshly criticised the move, pointing out that deputies were being browbeaten by a shooting lobby which represents only 3 per cent of France's population.

"The hunters' short-sightedness will cost us dear," she said, warning deputies after the vote that they should be prepared to increase significantly her ministry's budget to pay EU fines. The government, she said, opposed the bill because it complicated the protection of migratory species and lacked global vision, common sense and flexibility.

The hunters showed their political muscle before the vote by staging a mass march in Paris in February.

The row with Brussels is an unusual one in that France appears to be deliberately defying the court in refusing to transpose into French law a directive whose enactment it presided over during its 1979 presidency.

In most cases the threat of a fine by the Commission has succeeded in dramatically hastening previously languishing legislation through parliaments in a matter of weeks.

A Commission spokesman observed wryly this week that such efficiency was invariably explained away as being unrelated to the imminence of a substantial fine. "We're not convinced," he said.

In the meantime, migrating birds would do well to keep clear of French shores.