Galicia, along with eleven autonomous communities and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, has sent a letter to the European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and Competitive Circular Economy, Jessika Roswall, in which they claim the "technical rigor" applied in wolf management and criticize the "arbitrary attitude" of the central government on this matter.
Andalusia, Cantabria, La Rioja, Region of Murcia, Comunitat Valenciana, Aragon, the Canary Islands, Extremadura, the Balearic Islands, Madrid, and Castilla y León have joined this initiative, reproaching the Executive for wanting to "claim the conservation status of this species as unfavorable when scientific data indicate it is favorable."
As explained in the letter, signed by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Ángeles Vázquez, and other regional officials, the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge initiated an extraordinary procedure, not contemplated in the regulations, which "seeks to convince public opinion that the communities were incapable of rigorously providing all the necessary data and information."
The Xunta details in a statement that the documentation associated with this process "includes expressions such as unilateral assessments lacking any scientific validation that suggest the information gathered by the communities is unreliable."
In the document, the autonomous communities emphasize that "it is contradictory that this new procedure is only considered necessary for the documentation of the wolf, and the work done for other species, which was carried out with the same procedure, with the same participants, and with the same criteria, is not questioned at any time."
Likewise, they criticize that the state Executive "also did not respect the communication and dialogue procedure for the formal validation of the submitted files in the case of the wolf." In contrast, they recall that "there were requests for review by the Ministry on formal issues in the reports of other species, which were resolved in a timely manner."
In relation to the methodology followed, the communities denounce that the central government relies on alleged directives from community authorities that are "either false or sow doubts about a supposed inconsistency of regional data."
The regional governments also allude to "subjective interpretations" that the Ministry makes of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), thus questioning the legal basis used by the Executive.
Finally, the regional representatives demand clarifications from the European commissioner regarding recent statements by the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, in which he assured that he had already sent "himself" the wolf data to the European Commission, information that, according to the communities' complaints, was not communicated or shared with them.