(Judgment) When designating an area of land as a wild bird special protection site, economic factors were to be excluded.
ECJ Article 4(1) or Article 4(2) of Directive 79/409 on the conservation of wild birds, which requires the Member States to take special conservation measures for certain species, and in particular to designate as Special Protection Areas the most suitable territories for their conservation, must be interpreted as meaning that a Member State is not authorized to take account of the economic requirements mentioned in Article 2 of the directive when choosing and defining the boundaries of a Special Protection Area or even to take account of economic requirements constituting a general interest superior to that represented by the ecological objective of that directive. Similarly, a Member State may not take account of economic requirements in so far as they amount to imperative reasons of overriding public interest of the kind referred to in Article 6(4) of Directive 92/43 on the conservation of the natural habitats of wild fauna and flora, as inserted in Directive 79/409. Although the latter provision widened the range of grounds on which it may be justified to encroach upon Special Protection Areas already designated as such, by expressly including therein reasons of a social or economic nature, it nevertheless did not make any change regarding the initial stage of classification referred to in Article 4(1) and (2) of Directive 79/409, and therefore the classification of sites as Special Protection Areas must in all circumstances be carried out in accordance with the criteria accepted by those provisions.
Judges:
GC Rodriguez Iglesias, P
Citations:
Times 02-Aug-1996, [1997] 2 WLR 123, [1996] ECR I-3805, [1996] 3 CMLR 411, [1997] Env LR 442, C-44/95, [1997] QB 206, [1996] EUECJ C-44/95
Links:
Statutes:
Council Directive 79/409/EEC Conservation of Wild Birds
Cited by:
Cited – Bown v Secretary of State for Transport CA 31-Jul-2003
The appeal concerned the environmental effect of the erection of a bridge being part of a bypass. It was claimed that the area should have been designated as a Special Protection Area for Birds (SPA), and that if so it should be treated as such for . .
Cited – Sustainable Shetland v The Scottish Ministers and Another (Scotland) SC 9-Feb-2015
Wind Farm Permission Took Proper Account
Sustainable Shetland challenged the grant of permission for a wind farm saying that the respondents had failed properly to take account of their obligations under the Birds Directive, in respect of the whimbrel, a protected migratory bird.
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Environment, European
Updated: 03 June 2022; Ref: scu.161518