Combating wildlife trafficking with “detect and disrupt”
Born Free Foundation’s Associate Director for Asia and Oceania, Gabriel Fava says Sri Lanka is well equipped to tackle this global problem and should not be caught off-guard
By Kumudini Hettiarachchi and Sinali Ranwala
Star tortoises, cockatoos, leopards, pangolins, ‘white gold’ or ivory from elephant tusks, even frozen tiger-cubs and many more have a common but tragic thread woven into a tapestry that seems to cover the whole wide world.
The thread stretches from bio-piracy and bio-prospecting to wildlife trafficking, feeding a multi-billion dollar illegal trade, “big business”, which is pushing several fauna and flora to extinction.
It is to give voice to these grave concerns and urge for harder and joint crackdowns, international cooperation and better enforcement of the law that is already in place that a global expert in the form of the Born Free Foundation’s Associate Director for Asia and Oceania, Gabriel Fava, was in Colombo this week.
A ‘proactive’ stance is what he is crusading for, instead of a ‘reactive’ stance.
Illegal wildlife trafficking is such an obvious thing, it sounds simple, and seems easy to curb but sometimes the authorities may not see a poaching incident’s connections to a wider issue, let alone at a global level even at a national level, was Gabriel’s contention when we met him on Monday.
He delivered the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society’s monthly lecture on Thursday to a full-house at the BMICH’s Cinema Hall and also met many enforcement agencies.
“The frontline people such as the wildlife and police officers may not realize the magnitude of the issue. They may not realize that it is linked to an illegal trade, very similar to crime networks spanning not just countries and oceans but continents as well involved in drugs, arms and people smuggling,” he said, reiterating that wildlife traffickers use many sources of information -- open sources, documents et al and are boldly out in the open. They are also ‘patrons’ of the Darknet which is a part of the Deepweb. This is about 500 times the size of the World Wide Web and used for the promotion of illegal goods including wildlife and should be analyzed and monitored.
Categorizing wildlife trafficking within the bigger picture that is ‘transnational crime’, Gabriel is quick to point out that it impacts heavily on national security. Corruption, money laundering and human trafficking…..all are different sides of the same coin and are interconnected to wildlife, both animal and plant, trafficking. “They have an impact on the national economy and a huge impact on the rule of law and governance. So, mitigating these impacts is beneficial to governments.”
He earnestly urged Sri Lanka to use the same sources that traffickers use, as a weapon against them, while maximizing the already effective model encompassing the Police, the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) and the Customs that the country has in place to fight not only crime but also terrorism, while including the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) and any other relevant institution.
The model is to “detect and disrupt” and also prevent, while strengthening collaborations with external international agencies and utilizing the powerful international conventions already in place, says Gabriel lifting into view the well-known Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) of Wild Fauna and Flora and two crucial United Nations Conventions – the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNCTOC) and the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC).
(UNCAC is the only legally-binding universal anti-corruption instrument. Its farreaching approach and mandatory character make it a unique tool for developing a comprehensive response with regard to law enforcement, asset recovery and international cooperation.)
“Theses conventions allow countries to work on collaborations, without signing memoranda of understanding and delaying crackdowns. There may be resource issues, but these conventions can be invoked immediately and used effectively,” he advocated.
The next CITES meeting is scheduled to be held in Colombo in 2019.
Focusing on INTERPOL (the International Police Organization, an intergovernmental organization facilitating international police cooperation, based in Lyon, France), Gabriel says it has been very proactive.