France bans hunting trophy imports from threatened species
France has just done something the United Kingdom has been promising for years.
With immediate effect, France has stopped processing import permits for hunting trophies of threatened species and committed to a total ban on those imports. The decision comes from the French Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, dated 28 July 2026. On 31 July, Mathieu Lefèvre, the Minister Delegate for Ecological Transition, instructed France’s nature and CITES authorities to apply it at once, across the whole country, without waiting for every last regulation to be rewritten.
In plain language: French hunters can no longer bring home the heads, skins and bodies of threatened animals as souvenirs. The road here was not simple. A draft law was submitted in 2023 and, in January 2024, discussed in parliamentary committee, where it was adopted by a near-unanimous vote: a form of consultation in itself. It was then scheduled for a vote in parliament, but that was cancelled when the National Assembly was dissolved. In 2025 one bill was submitted to parliament and another to the Senate, but a heavy legislative backlog made it almost impossible to schedule a debate. In the end the government acted directly.
What the instruction actually says
The official letter is short and clear. It covers hunting trophies of species listed under EU wildlife trade rules in Annex A, and further threatened species in Annex B (XIII) for which an import permit is already required. Competent services are told not to process those permit applications any longer. Until the full legal text is finished, the orientation is to be applied without delay and uniformly.
That is how serious policy looks when a government means it: one decision, one signature, and the permits stop.
France already banned lion trophy imports after the killing of Cecil in 2015. It was done the same way: a minister’s decision, by the then minister Ségolène Royal. This created the precedent now being used again. This time it goes much further, reaching elephants, leopards, hippos and other threatened mammals that still appear in European trophy import statistics, not only lions.
Why it matters
Between 2015 and 2024, France imported 827 hunting trophies from CITES-listed mammal species. Across the same period, the European Union as a whole imported more than 27,000 such trophies. After the United States, the EU is the world’s second-largest destination market for hunting trophies of mammals already recognised as of conservation concern.
Those numbers are not abstract. Every “personal trophy” is an animal that was shot so someone could display it. For species already under pressure from habitat loss, human conflict and commercial trade, that demand is a luxury the wild cannot afford.
Public opinion in France is not ambiguous either. Polling has shown around nine in ten French people support a ban on imports of trophies of endangered species (IFOP, 2023). The government has finally caught up with its own citizens.
And the United Kingdom?
Here is the uncomfortable comparison.
The UK has debated a hunting-trophy import ban for years. A private member’s bill made real progress and then stalled. Ministers have spoken warmly about ending the trade. Permits for trophies of threatened species have continued. We have written about this many times, including why the government is still stalling and why the door must finally shut.
France has shown that the obstacle is not technical difficulty. It is political will. If Paris can instruct its CITES services to stop the paper trail tomorrow, London can do the same.
We will be taking this directly to the UK Government. The French decision puts our own ministers on the spot. Being “out of touch” is no longer a debating point; it is now visible against a neighbour who has simply acted.
What needs to happen next
In France: the full text finalised as an official order (not a law), with tight definitions and no quiet exemptions for “personal effects” or special cases.
In the UK: a government bill with parliamentary time, not another warm promise that dies in procedure.
In the EU: an EU-wide ban, so hunters cannot simply shop around for a more permissive Member State. The European Parliament already called for this in 2022; national action like France’s makes the case harder to ignore.
Trophy hunting is sold as conservation. The evidence, and the animals themselves, say otherwise. Ending the import market is one of the cleanest levers consuming countries have. France has pulled it. Britain should follow, without another decade of delay.
We will keep putting the case for wild lions, and for every other threatened species treated as a wall decoration, until the law catches up with common decency.
Thank you, as always, for standing with the lions, and for keeping the pressure on until the law catches up.
With warmest wishes from all at LionAid
Photo credit: Martin Fowkes