A European Union Parliamentary committee, on a fact-finding mission on hunting in Malta, said it had not yet formed an opinion on the matter or whether Malta was accurately and properly transposing into its legislation the EU’s Birds Directive.

The chairman of the parliament’s Petitions Committee Marcin Libicki said the committee members came to Malta without an opinion. He said the committee will return to Brussels to evaluate and process whatever they heard during their visit.

Mr Libicki said the visit had helped the committee members to better understand and appreciate what was happening in Malta with regard to hunting and trapping.

Pressed for a better reply, Mr Libicki said: “Trapping in Malta is protected by a derogation that the Maltese government managed to get from the EU prior to joining the EU. Nothing should be done immediately. We know that hunting is a traditional activity in Malta and that it has been going on for generations. The derogation is there and it cannot be given endlessly. I will not propose anything but, sooner or later, the derogation will have to end.”

He continued: “Malta has no birds. All the birds in Malta are migratory birds so, strictly speaking, the birds that pass over Malta are common European ownership. We didn’t come here expecting to catch someone red-handed, doing something which goes against the Birds Directive. We came here to listen. We will form our opinion later.”

He said the committee members did not see anything illegal during their fact-finding mission. They had visited the Ghadira Nature Reserve, met several Members of Parliament, Maltese citizens and the Ombudsman Chief Justice Emeritus Joseph Said Pullicino.

The committee’s head of secretariat David Lowe said the committee still had to “sit back and assess the contrasting information” it was given by those in favour and those against hunting. He said the committee received petitions from Maltese and from some Italian and French nationals who came to Malta on holiday and who felt they needed to write to the committee to say that they disapproved of hunting in Malta.

Asked whether the committee members came here to surprise people breaching the Birds Directive, Mr Lowe said they did not come to Malta on a secret mission. He said it was not easy to take decisions from an office in Brussels so they needed to come here to see for themselves and to speak to people about the issue.

Mr Lowe said the committee also processed other petitions from Malta. One was from the Malta Association of Women in Business on the difficulty to access EU funds for a social project. He said the association complained that it wanted to set up an educational training centre for disadvantaged women – such as single mothers – but this had been hijacked by the government and the project never took off.

Another petition the committee processed was that regarding the Qui-si-Sana development. Those who signed the petition claimed that citizens were finding it difficult to access environmental information.