Malta once again risks violating human rights by political appointment of LESA head

The appointment can be considered as just yet another action by the government to relax regulation and enforcement on hunting and environmental offences. Obviously, as a previous board member of the hunters’ lobby group, the FKNK, Charlton Falzon Cascun has a conflict of interest on principle and also directly.

In 2022, the European Court of Human Rights condemned the Maltese government in casse S.H. v. Malta (37241/21) after finding that the State had failed to provide an independent and effective remedy to a Bangladeshi journalist seeking asylum. The Court held that Malta violated Article 13 taken together with Article 3 of the Convention because the International Protection Agency and the International Protection Appeals Tribunal carried out only a superficial, accelerated review, without adequate legal assistance or a rigorous assessment of the risk he faced if returned; sending him back without a fresh examination would itself breach Article 3.

Although the case was about asylum procedure rather than hunting enforcement as such, Strasbourg criticised a pattern that is highly relevant here: specialised bodies appointed or controlled by the executive, deciding cases that affect fundamental rights, without the guarantees of independence required of a court. Appointing an FKNK council member and former police officer to chair LESA — the agency that issues and administers local enforcement tickets, including those that can touch hunting and countryside offences, repeats that same violation of putting a stakeholder in charge of the referee.

Hunting illegalities have been increasing in the past few years as the government increasingly reduced enforcement practices to appease the hunting lobby.