More than a dozen autonomous communities, along with the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, have sent a letter to the European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and Competitive Circular Economy, Jessika Roswall, in which they claim the "technical rigor" of her actions on the wolf and reproach the central government for its "arbitrary attitude" on this matter.
In the letter, signed by Andalusia, Cantabria, La Rioja, Region of Murcia, Valencian Community, Aragon, the Canary Islands, Extremadura, the Balearic Islands, Madrid, and Castilla y León, the Executive is accused of "intending to declare the conservation status of this species as unfavorable when scientific data indicate that it is favorable".
The Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Ángeles Vázquez, and her counterparts explain to the community official that the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge opened an additional procedure not contemplated in the regulations which, they claim, "intends to convince public opinion that the communities were not capable of rigorously providing all the necessary data and information".
As highlighted by the Xunta in a statement, the documentation of that process "includes expressions such as unilateral assessments lacking any scientific validation that suggest that the information collected by the communities is not reliable".
The communities emphasize that "it is contradictory that this new procedure is only considered necessary for the documentation of the wolf, and the work carried out for other species, which was done with the same procedure, with the same participants and with the same criteria, is not questioned at any time".
Likewise, they reproach that the central government "also did not respect the communication and dialogue procedure for the formal validation of the submitted files in the case of the wolf", while "there were requests for review by the Ministry of formal issues in the reports of other species, which were resolved in due course".
In relation to the analysis criteria, the communities denounce that the Executive invokes supposed guidelines from the community authorities that "are either false or sow doubts about a supposed inconsistency of the regional data".
They also question "subjective interpretations" that the Ministry makes of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
Finally, the regional representatives ask for clarifications from the European Commissioner about recent statements by the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, in which he assured that he had already delivered "himself" the wolf data to the European Commission, information that, according to the communities, has not been communicated to them.