Birds in the European Union - BirdLife International

2
Birds in the European Union: a status assessment – Introduction
to demonstrate that they had classified insufficient numbers
and areas of SPAs. Four of these cases have been judged at the
European Court of Justice and four Member States have been
condemned (these are the Netherlands Case C-3/96, France
Case C-202/01, Finland Case C-240/00, Italy Case C-378/01)
for insufficient numbers and areas of SPAs classified as
compared to the IBA inventories for those countries. The
Commission in taking the above cases to the Court used the
“IBA 89” assessment (Grimmett and Jones 1989), the IBA 2000
inventory (Heath and Evans 2000) and national inventories.
The cases concerned the obligations arising from articles 4 (1)
and 4 (2) of the Directive.
■ Species
As regards the species protection obligations arising from the
Directive, BirdLife International has contributed the first ever
inventory of bird Conservation Status in Europe. That was Birds
in Europe (Tucker and Heath 1994) and it provided information
on all Species of European Conservation Concern classified
according to a set of standard criteria. BirdLife International is
also coordinating the unification of European monitoring
schemes for common birds, under a scheme called the Pan-
European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS).
BirdLife International works together with the European Bird
Census Council (www.ebcc.info) to coordinate this.
Furthermore, BirdLife’s monitoring strategy closely mirrors
the provisions of the Birds Directive. This includes three strands:
site monitoring (IBAs), common species monitoring (Pan-
European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme) and threatened
species monitoring.
Finally, BirdLife International works actively on reforming
the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). BirdLife International
data have demonstrated severe declines in farmland birds, which
have been linked to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
BirdLife recommendations on the policy changes have been
largely based on the BirdLife data. BirdLife has been running
a campaign to reform the Common Agricultural Policy in the
EU since 2002 (www.birdlifecapcampaign.org).