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| Wildlife crime scorecard - Assessing compliance with and envorecement of CITES commitments for tigers, rhinos and elephants | |
| 2012 Full Book | |
While CITES mainly prohibits or regulates international trade, it has continued to expand its role to prevent illegal trade at the national level through the adoption of various "Decisions" and "Resolutions". This is critical to ensure illegal trade at national levels does not lead to international trade dynamics that undermine the conservation of elephants, rhinos and tigers, in addition to the effectiveness of the Convention itself. The approach to each species group differs, but all include national measures to control not only international, but also internal trade in the species' parts, derivatives and products: For tigers, it is recommended that internal trade be "prohibited" (Res Conf. 12.5 Rev. CoP15 ); For rhinos, it is recommended that such trade be "restricted" (Res Conf. 9.14 Rev. CoP15); For elephants, "unregulated domestic sale of ivory [is to] to be prohibited" under the Action Plan for the Control of Trade in Elephant Ivory Decision 13.26 Rev. CoP15 Annex 2). Other common themes include strengthening law enforcement; coordination with other countries; improved data collection; enacting deterrent legal penalties for illegal trade; and raising public awareness, especially among user groups. Tigers, rhinos and elephants were the subject of renewed and substantial concern at the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES (CoP15) in 2010 and the 61st meeting of the CITES Standing Committee (SC61) in 2011, specifically in regard to the scale of illegal trade. This report, produced to coincide with the 62nd meeting of the CITES Standing Committee (in July 2012), selects 23 range, transit and consumer countries from Asia and Africa facing the highest levels of illegal trade in elephant ivory, rhino horn and tiger parts (Annex 1), and evaluates their progress since CoP15 towards compliance with and enforcement of CITES commitments for these three species groups. Countries are scored green, yellow and red to signal recent implementation effort, and indicate whether governments are moving in the right direction to curb illegal trade in these species groups, or to indicate whether they have made little progress. Recent actions underpinning the country scores are discussed, and recommendations are made for all countries to improve compliance and enforcement, but with focus on key countries identified in this assessment as urgently needing to show progress. It is important to note that illegal internal trade in these three species groups persists in virtually all of the selected countries, however this report seeks to differentiate countries where it is actively being countered from those where current efforts are entirely inadequate. It should also be noted that a green score of all three species groups does not mean that the country in question is free of wildlife crime. In many cases there are widespread problems concerning illegal trade in other species, such as reptiles and primates. Moreover, some of these countries are performing poorly in terms of other conservation governance indicators and threats to the three species groups, such as the integrity of protected areas (WWF, 2012a). |
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