1991 - 2006. EUROBATS celebrates its 15th anniversary

Just over 1 years ago, I got a new
job. As a career civil servant in the
UK Department of the Environment, I
was following the usual pattern of moving
to a new post every 4 years or so. I had
actually spent the previous 4 and a half
years handling the Government’s relation-
ship with the main British para-statal body
dealing with wildlife, the Nature Conser-
vancy Council (NCC). The relationship had
become a stormy one. Ministers at that
time decided for various reasons to abo-
lish the NCC and replace it with 3 separate
bodies for England, Scotland and Wales. I
had been in the eye of the storm, as a civil
servant duty bound to carry through policy
decided by elected Ministers, which then
required an Act of Parliament. The Act took
much of 1990 to secure. It was an exciting
but bruising experience. As the senior of-
ficial handling the Bill in its Parliamentary
stages, I had to liaise with a wide range of
politicians and conservationists. However
the Bill was not popular in most of the con-
servation world. Although we were able to
allay some concerns through the creation
of the Joint Nature Conservation Commit-
tee (JNCC) to provide international and UKwide
expertise, I often found myself as the
“man in the middle” on the receiving end of
fierce criticism from conservationists and
scientists whose viewpoints I personally
respected as an official who had intentionally
made wildlife and convergence issues
my “career anchor”. Moreover, much of the
1991-2006 • EUROBATS celebrates its 15 th anniversary
The birth of EUROBATS
or how CMS survived after 12 barren years...
by Robert Hepworth
debate about the recognition of the NCC
was not about wildlife, but politics and the
balance of power between Ministries in late
Thatcherite Britain.
Thus it was with a sense of relief that I
took over my new post in January 1991 in
charge of international conservation policy
and zoos — it was a chance to get back to
conservation and in my own eyes, perhaps
to redeem a slightly guilty conscience about
the abolition of the NCC!
Convention on Migratory Species
One of the first issues I began to look at was
the future of the Convention on Migratory
Species, which was at that time the runt
of the “Stockholm” litter of global wildlife
conventions, increasingly dwarfed by its
big sisters CITES and Ramsar. Despite 12
years of operations, CMS had still failed to
negotiate a regional species Agreement designed
from the outset to be a tool of the
Convention. It was clear to several Parties,
including me, that unless CMS made tangible
and rapid progress, especially on “Article
IV” species agreements, then its very
existence would be under review at the
COP due in September 1991.
Two factors put me in a unique position
to influence the outcome. First I took
over half way through the UK’s first term as
the Chair of the CMS Standing Committee,
which gave me an inside track with the Secretariat.
Secondly, I soon discovered that
quite a lot of negotiations had already taken
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