Taking down wildlife smugglers

Taking down wildlife smugglers WCO, CITES secretariats step up cooperation to protect endangered species.


Brussels
      Customs administrations are stepping up their efforts to track and take down illicit wildlife smuggling rings that attempt to hide their activities among legitimate international trade.
      Controlled wildlife products are highlighted within the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which aims to prevent the decimation of certain animals and plants. The World Customs Organization has been engaged in CITES enforcement since the 1970s.
      'Customs administrations will continue to play an active role in enforcing CITES at borders as national boundaries are the frontline in the fight against transborder environmental crime,' said WCO Secretary General Kunio Mikuriya in a presentation to the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES in Doha, Qatar on March 13-25. 'The border is the last line of defense to prevent smuggled goods from reaching the domestic market.'
      CITES has been difficult for countries to enforce, and crimes involving illegal wildlife shipments are increasingly carried out by well organized criminal groups. 'They work closely together in a coordinated manner with very sophisticated techniques, starting with poaching, moving across the border and all the way to the final destination,' explained Hui Fu, technical officer responsible for compliance and facilitation at the WCO.
      In recent years, the WCO has raised awareness of CITES-related crimes among frontline customs officers. The organization in 2008 called for its 176 customs administration members to continue their efforts to fight environmental crime and ensure that the environment remains a priority issue in their operations. Further expanding on this effort, the WCO Council chose the theme 'Customs and environment: protecting our natural heritage' as the organization's key theme for 2009.
      Other WCO enhancements include amending the harmonized system ' the international goods nomenclature managed by the WCO ' to enable customs officers to identify and monitor traded species covered by CITES. The WCO also maintains a database of global seizure records in its Customs Enforcement Network communication (CENcomm) system, which helps customs administrations to identify trends in illicit wildlife trade and study the modus operandi of environmental criminals.
      The WCO Regional Intelligence Liaison Offices have been active in environmental border protection by collecting and analyzing seizure information while the WCO has hosted regional training events using an e-learning platform and organizing capacity building initiatives, Mikuriya said.
      In addition, five international organizations, including the CITES Secretariat, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Interpol, WCO and the World Bank, have recently designed the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime (ICCWC), a strategic approach to stopping wildlife crime in a more formidable and coordinated way.
      'One of the reasons behind this focus on the environment is the effort by the world's customs community to remain responsive to the concerns of citizens across the globe that the international trade in species should be legal and sustainable, and that those who commit environmental offenses should be actively pursued,' Mikuriya said. 'I have received positive feedback that customs officers were proud to join global endeavors aimed at preserving mother earth and its biodiversity.'
      On Jan. 15, 2009, Operation CITES, a global one-day intensive control, was carried out by 90 customs administrations around the world, leading to seizures totaling 4,630 endangered live species as well as products and derivatives. These seizures involved as many as 80 species, including ivory tusks, musk, tiger derivatives, caviar, rhinoceros horns, lynx, snow lotus, and lion skins. In 2009 alone, customs officers in several countries confiscated more than 23 tons of ivory from numerous incidents, a record high, according to the WCO.