Our challenge of Badger culling: Wild Justice (WJ) is taking a legal challenge of NE’s licensing of further Badger culling – a decision that was made against the advice of NE’s Chief Scientist under what we regard as pressure from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) during the Conservative administration. This challenge is made by WJ and Badger Trust. NE has applied to the courts to increase the adverse costs cap normally paid by claimants (that would be WJ and Badger Trust) if they lose a legal challenge. The costs are usually capped at £10k for each claimant under the UK operation of the Aarhus Convention, one of whose aims is to protect access to justice for the public. At Wild Justice we would say that we are quintessentially an Aarhus-compliant organisation – one of the things we do is to take legal challenges for wildlife on behalf of the public – cases that an individual would find it very difficult to fund and very difficult to take for reasons of unfamiliarity with the law. NE wants Wild Justice to pay £20k and Badger Trust (a charity) to pay £30k. We have made legal arguments to the court that the cap should not be raised and that NE is attacking the Aarhus principles to which the UK is a signatory. We thought you should know that the state nature conservation body is taking this approach and is rather keen on getting our money (all of which is your money originally). We’d like to see how NE would manage if it had to raise its own funds like we do rather than having an income of over £350m gifted to them by the taxpayer (that’s you too). It is ironic that the decision which NE is aggressively defending was made when, we say, Defra leant on NE under the Conservative administration. The new Labour government has announced that Badger culling will end in five years (should be sooner!) but NE is still defending its actions to license culling under a past administration.
