‘The proposal has been rejected, with the European Union opposing it in the name of all its members,’ European official Eladio Fernandez Galiano, told AFP, following a meeting on the Bern Convention at the Council of Europe.
The Strasbourg-based council, which is separate from the European Union, houses the secretariat of the Bern Convention, whose signatories include European as well as some African nations.
The 24-year-old convention aimed to conserve fauna and flora places the wolf in its highest, ‘strictly protected’ category.
Switzerland has been trying to downgrade the animal to only a ‘protected’ species in recent years. It argues wolf populations have rebounded in a number of European countries -- and have appeared in new places such as France, Germany and Switzerland.
A simple ‘protected’ category allows for selective culling. But Galiano argued the convention already offers certain flexibility in treating strictly protected species.
 ‘But in this kind of case, countries must explain and justify every two years the reasons for taking exceptional measures,’ he added.