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Today we had a very constructive meeting with Rory Stewart, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
The Minister was accompanied by Jeremy Eppel, Deputy Director DEFRA, Dr Vin Fleming, the Head of Global Programme at the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (the UK CITES Scientific Authority) and Dr Amy Dickman, over a telephone link from WildCru in Oxford.
We met to discuss the UK position on the importation of lion trophies into the UK in the light of the continuing catastrophic declines in lion populations.
We are delighted to say that Minister Stewart confirmed that the UK would urge the EU to ban the importation of lion trophies from both Zambia and Mozambique at their next Scientific Review Group (SRG) meeting on December 15th.
He further directed that in the event that the UK was not able to convince the EU to impose this ban across all 28 Member States, then the UK would then immediately impose the ban of Zambian and Mozambique lion trophies into the UK.
LionAid believe there to be no more than 40 lion trophy males left now in Zambia so this ban is very good news indeed, especially since Zambia has stated it will re-instate lion trophy hunting in 2016.
Similarly Mozambique cannot afford in our view to lose any more of their prime male lions as trophies and a UK ban on their importation will send a strong message to other countries who still are undecided about lion trophy imports from this African country.
We will contact as many of the other EU Member States as we can before the mid December SRG to hopefully convince them to follow the UK's excellent new initiative. We need more dominoes to fall – Australia came first, France came second, and now the UK is taking a tougher stance.
There is more work to be done but this is an encouraging start!
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