Spring hunting is not a right

There are some things in life you don't get to see very often. Like Malta qualifying for the World Cup finals, for instance. Or a government contract for which no bribes were offered or paid. Or how about the sight of the hunters' organisation gripped with what suddenly looks like paralytic fear?

Now that's something you certainly don't see every day. Normally, it's the other way round. It's the rest of the country that quakes in its boots the moment the same hunting lobby threatens to take its members out into the streets... and not without good reason. The last time that happened was in 2007, and the hunters left a trail of damage in their wake. One journalist had to be hospitalised for minor injuries, and Malta slipped a few places in the European rankings for press freedoms as a result.

So make no mistake: the hunting lobby has never hesitated to use its considerable firepower to get exactly what it wants, when it wants it, no questions asked. And despite the fact that it only represents around 4 - 5% of the voting population (there are around 11,000 licensed hunters, and a few more thousand unlicensed ones), successive administrations have always fallen over themselves in the mad scramble to capitulate to the hunters' every demand.

For this reason - and also because the European Commission has quite simply washed its hands of the entire issue - the proposed abrogative referendum now represents the last chance for the people to actually decide on an issue that has been decided for them, without any consultation whatsoever, for decades.

In a sense this is a positive development: it illustrates a long overdue and dramatic turning of the tables. I am happy to note that the petition has so far attracted 30,000 signatures, and only needs around 4,000 more for the referendum to become a reality. Evidently, there is a hunger among the wider population for its own voice to be heard above the cacophony of gunfire that has always surrounded this issue. The petition has given them this chance... and believe it or not, it represents the only time to date the Maltese population has ever actually been asked its own opinion in the matter.

More to the point: the hunters have now sensed the referendum is now inevitable too... and of course their reaction has been exactly the same as it has always been when faced with anything they don't like. They want to shoot it down as quickly as possible ('if it flies it dies', remember?).

But fear makes for an unreliable ally. It clouds your judgment and makes you do some pretty darn stupid things. So the FKNK, now visibly terrified, has embarked on a petition of its own, with a view to amending the Referendums Act to ensure that this particular referendum (or any other, for reasons I shall come to in a sec) is not held at all. They want to do this specifically by inserting a clause to protect "rights, traditions and privileges" of minorities. 

A few small points. One, what they are actually proposing is to change the rules half-way through the game. Remember that 30,000 signatures have already been collected on the understanding that a referendum will be held. You can't suddenly change the rulebook to say, oh, sorry, we forgot to mention that you can't actually have a referendum on this issue. (Why not, you ask? Because we don't want you to. What other reason could there be?)

Sorry folks, but that's just plain tyrannical. The abrogative referendum is a legitimate democratic tool and the petition is entirely in accordance to the precise terms of the Referendum Act (chapter 237 of the laws of Malta, if you want to know). Changing that law now, at this late stage, just to derail the referendum would not only constitute a patently anti-democratic act worthy of Kim Il Sung... it would also be retroactive, and as such illegal. There is no legal proviso enabling laws to be amended by means of a petition. Laws are amended by the party controlling the majority in parliament.... and judging by the ongoing PAC committee hearings, they seem to prefer Christmas hampers, as well as gifts of cufflinks and jewellery, to a bunch of useless signatures.

Even without considering the fact that the hunters' petition is not (unlike the referendum petition) propped up by any legal underpinning at all... what exactly were the hunters thinking, anyway? Do they seriously imagine they can match 30,000 signatures, when their own lobby adds up to only marginally less than one third that number? Or is their actual intention to illustrate to the world how very small their lobby really is... in which case it would be a straight repetition of the same mistake they had made when they contested the 2009 MEP election, and obtained less than 1% of the vote?

Either way, the proposal doesn't make sense. And that is precisely why our government - which in barely nine months has already proved that 'sense' is not necessarily high on its agenda - might be tempted to take it seriously, with shockingly devastating consequences for our democratic credentials.

The real issue here concerns the core argument brought by the hunters in defence of spring hunting, which represents a dangerous perversion of the basic principles of democracy. On paper, their argument appears to hold water: it is true, for instance, that basic fundamental rights should not be subject to a referendum, because this could be used to deny minorities their rights.

But that only holds good for fundamental rights, which are inscribed in charters and treaties to which countries are signatory. Simply put, there is no universal right to a spring hunting season. Nor there can there ever be one, because hunting, by definition, also impinges on the rights of others. Not just birds, mind you. There are health and safety considerations, there is contamination of agricultural soil by lead pellets, and a host of other issues that place hunting in the category of a minority pastime that must be controlled for the sake of the wider population.

Ironically a ban on hunting in spring - the mating season for birds - is one of these controls, and it was a perverse situation to begin with that Malta always placed the interest of hunters above all other concerns when regulating this matter.

If further proof were needed, the court ruling the hunters themselves cite in defence of their arguments was not delivered by a human rights court. It was the European Court of Justice, which (unlike the ECHR) is answerable to the European Union and deals only with legal issues pertaining the Union. The FKNK is trying to camouflage this fact - pretending that the ruling awarded them a 'right' to shoot in spring, when what it actually did (apart from finding Malta guilty of opening successive spring hunting seasons) was raise the possibility that spring hunting may be permissible under community law - which I need hardly add is not the same thing at all.

I won't go into the reasons why spring hunting should never even have been considered in the first place. These concern the conservation of wildlife and the hopeless inability of the local authorities to regulate a sector that is wildly out of control (with a few parentheses concerning public access to land and other ancillary issues).

But the truly insidious part of the FKNK's strategy is that it would effectively undermine the referendum law and rob the country of practically its only means to assert itself outside of the usual 'election-every-five-years' model. If government buys into the argument that a referendum can't be held to protect a minority's privileges - again, I stress we are talking about a privilege here, and an ill-gotten one at that - then by extension anyone else would be able to make the same argument over practically any other issue. And there, at the stroke of a pen, the entire concept of direct democracy will become officially extinct.

Meanwhile the only real right that would have been sacrificed to achieve this aim would be the fundamental right of a nation to make its own choices and determine its own destiny. This right has been consistently denied us on this issue - and arguably others too - for decades. It is time we put a stop to this. And if the government thinks it can override such basic democratic rights by tinkering with the fundamentals of democracy itself... well, it will have another guess coming.