A proposed revision to China’s Wildlife Protection Law is being criticized by conservationists who fear it could legitimize the commercial exploitation of endangered species, such as tigers, bears and pangolins.
“This is not a step forward,” said Toby Zhang, director of Ta Foundation, an animal protection organization based in Beijing. “This is a surrender to the wrong and the benighted.”
The draft legislation would be the first major revision of the 1989 law, which animal welfare advocates had long faulted as providing inadequate safeguards for wildlife, and some proposed changes have won their praise.
For example, the bill opens with a mention of its intent to protect not just animals, but also their habitats. It also states for the first time that the state has a responsibility to help maintain biodiversity. The draft legislation was made public on Jan. 1 and open for comment until Friday last week.
However, where the existing law is vague about the legality of trading and breeding endangered species for food and medicine — a situation critics said opened too many loopholes for animal exploitation and abuse — the proposed revisions make explicit that endangered species are “natural resources” that can be legally bred in captivity for commercial purposes.
It also shifts the power for licensing these activities from the central government to provincial ones, which critics say are more likely to bend to local interests.
Some of the proposed changes could overturn existing animal protections, conservationists say. Since 2010, zoos in all Chinese cities have been banned from staging animal performances. And while there are more bears being held captive for their bile, used in traditional medical potions, than in years past, public resistance has become more vocal. Trade in tiger bone and rhino horn was banned in 1993.
The new law, if passed, could jeopardize these gains, conservationists and some legal experts say.
One clause could legalize animal performances if a provincial-level government grants a permit. Another clause in the bill says the use of wild animals as medicine, supplements or food must be “in conformity with the country’s related laws and regulations on Chinese traditional medicine, supplements and food,” without specifying which related laws, whether those dealing with consumer safety or the sources of ingredients.
“A major step backward and a disaster for conservation,” said An Xiang (安翔), director of Dexiang Law Firm in Beijing, who has campaigned for animal welfare legislation.
He said he viewed the medicine and food clause as a green light for activities like bear bile farming and eating tigers and pangolins.
“If the current law is vague and stops shy of allowing the commercial use of animals, the new law is brazenly detailed about it, telling you how these animals may be used and where to go to get a permit,” An said.
Zhang, who said his foundation was involved in drafting the bill, agreed that commercial interests overtook the final proposal. He said that the foundation had collaborated with the Chinese State Council’s Development Research Center, a government think tank, to organize seminars in which lawmakers met with environmentalists, legal professionals, government officials and business representatives.
“Every time we were presented a draft containing inputs from the previous discussion. The officials were open-minded, and everybody got a fair hearing,” he said. “But then at the last meeting in September, we saw the reverse.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS