Good morning!
We have just had some good news. This
morning we heard from our legal team that the Hon Mr Justice Griffiths
has granted us permission for judicial review of Natural Resources
Wales's (NRW's) general licences - we are going to court!
Moreover, we have been granted an expedited hearing which is excellent.
This challenge is to the legality of
NRW's general licences authorising the killing of a variety of bird
species as 'pests' or for nature conservation purposes. See these posts
on the Wild Justice blog for more details if you are interested in the
technicalities - see here, here, here and here. This challenge is, thanks to you, fully funded - see here.
We don't know when this case will come to court but some time in the autumn looks likely.
Mr Justice Griffiths refused BASC’s
(British Association for Shooting and Conservation's) application to be
added as an Interested Party 'because the Defendant [NRW] and Secretary of State [DEFRA, as an Interested Party] sufficiently
represent the interests engaged by the claim and can advance the
evidence and arguments to oppose it. The addition of BASC as a further
Interested Party is neither necessary nor desirable and would only serve
to increase the costs and prolong the proceedings.'. We expect BASC, having blown one gasket (see here)
to blow another one on this correct characterisation of their value to
these proceedings; neither necessary nor desirable. We wonder what the
BASC membership will make of this as undoubtedly BASC will have incurred
staff and legal costs already in getting
nowhere...
Still, we mustn't gloat...
These legal cases often seem quite
long drawn out affairs. And then news, often good news (but it won't
always be good news) pops out all of a sudden. It's a good way to start
the week. We wanted you, our supporters to be the first to know. We'll
put this information on our blog later in the day.
That's all for now.
Wild Justice (Directors: Mark Avery, Chris Packham and Ruth Tingay).
No comments:
Post a Comment