Page 113 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

Annamaria Procacci
Director National, ENPA

Thank you.
Thank you on behalf of our association: I’m personally grateful to all of
you. I have spent many years of my life fighting to protect animals. I have spent
these years relying on your help: help from the State Forestry Department and
from the Carabinieri Corps. All is connected: this is one of the most impressive
statements taken from Pope Francis’s encyclical who is present here today,
somehow, as a protagonist also of this day. Rightly we mention him in this cir-
cumstance. All is connected: we are all inhabitants of the same planet; this
Earth is the only one we have. These were our key words and, more than ever,
they still are: I refer to human animals and to non-human animals.
Earlier, you mentioned the situation of the European honey buzzard:
some years ago, when I was a member of the Parliament with the Verdi Party,
I brought into the Parliament House two buzzards that had been killed in the
area of the Messina Strait and showed them to the other colleagues: those
beautiful wings, those wonderful creatures were full of blood. I was thrown out
of the House, obviously, and banned for two days. Compared to what happe-
ned later in the Parliament Houses, I never regretted of that episode.
“Wild animal life is a patrimony strictly bound to the State”: this is what
article 1, Law 157 of 1992 states. This was a mediation law which left everybody
unhappy. However, it was a fundamental law, still in force despite of the strong
attack it has undergone through the years. Therefore, taking into account the
principle of wild animal life being patrimony strictly bound to the State, what
can it follow from a legal point of view? I wish to express my gratitude to Mr
Maurizio Santoloci, because we owe him the juridical hypothesis - fortunately
implemented again - of poaching as an offence against the State. This is what
article 1 states: “Wild animal life is a patrimony strictly bound to the State who
safeguards it in the interest of the national and international community”.
In his speech Dr Pennisi referred to the role of citizens: they are also the
protagonists of this important day. Also Dr Fanti, this morning, mentioned
European citizens with regard to their enthusiasm, their participation, their pas-

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