Environment committee erupts as MPs accuse Elam of shielding hunters

MPs clashed on Wednesday over the conduct of anti-poaching activists, with accusations that the House environment committee was being used to persecute such groups while refusing them the chance to answer for themselves.

Akel MP Giorgos Loukaides accused the committee’s chairman and Elam MP, Linos Papayiannis, of deliberately targeting environmental organisations.

“You put the organisations on the bench, but you do not allow them to be present here,” he said.

He asked whether a single activist had ever been convicted by the courts, and how many complaints existed against licensed hunters.

“We must defend the law and not those breaking it,” he said.

Papayiannis clarified that the session concerned one specific organisation, understood to be the committee against bird slaughter (CABS) and a second group working alongside it, rather than environmental groups in general.

He accused the pair of obstructing hunters and said a record of their activities had been passed to the justice ministry.

Game and fauna service head Pantelis Hadjigerou, when pressed by Akel MP Nikos Kettiros to clarify whether the second organisation was Terra Cypria or BirdLife, denied it was either group.

He further spoke of “terrorised legal hunters” unable to file complaints and called for the anti-poaching police branch to be bolstered.

Responding to criticism over the invite list, he remarked that 325 hunting representatives and 18 from environmental organisations “could not all be accommodated”.

Loukaides returned to the floor to repeat Akel’s position that the anti-poaching league should be re-established, and accused unspecified “criminal elements” of exploiting the situation.

Fellow Akel MP Nikos Kettiros submitted a separate request to place poaching itself on the committee’s agenda.

Alma leader Odysseas Michaelides asked whether police were investigating possible harassment offences by activists, while also crediting them with exposing illegal hunting and pointing out lapses by the authorities responsible for policing it.

Hadjigerou, whose comments prompted the debate, praised cooperation with groups such as Terra Cypria and BirdLife, but warned that confrontations in the field could turn fatal, with activists themselves at risk.

He put annual poaching and trapping cases at around 450, against fewer than 70 formal complaints a year, figures that Loukaidis and Michaelides cited as evidence the enforcement gap lies with poachers, not activists.

Outside parliament, animal rights groups and hunters gathered in parallel demonstrations as the committee met.

Paralimni hunting association president Andreas Hadjianastasis welcomed the debate, accusing activists of entering private property, filming hunters without their consent and flying drones.

“Whether they like it or not, what we are doing is entirely within the law,” he said, naming CABS specifically as the target of hunters’ objections.

CABS representative Andrea Rutigliano, called it “strange” his organisation had not been invited.

He said CABS members had been acquitted in two court cases and appear as police witnesses in illegal hunting cases roughly 15 to 20 times a year.