Shooting Times & Country Magazine
A sporting life in Africa
Conservation groups need to work with African courts on bringing poachers to justice
Laikipia, Kenya — poachers have butchered three-quarters of South Africa’s rhinos in the last decade. Countless pangolins are being killed to supply Far Eastern medicines that perhaps 20 million tons of them are trafficked annually. China is decimating every species, from Africa’s hardwood trees to its aardvarks and sea slugs, while baby cheetahs are smuggled to Arabia to adorn the front seats of oil sheikhs’ Lamborghinis.
While this desolation of Africa’s wildlife and environment accelerates, conservation groups persist with strategies that have cost fortunes, with money from wellintentioned donors such as, I’m sure, many of this magazine’s readers, which have ended up as bloody failures down the decades. They deploy armies of armed rangers to ‘fight’ poachers — and in this woke age they even have cohorts of all-female, all-vegan rangers — they establish ‘touchy feely’ projects to engage communities, they run campaigns, they live on lashings of cash from Russian oligarchs and Saudi Arabians, and of course they enjoy celebrity and rub shoulders with the royals at black-tie gala dinners.
This year the trade in ivory tusks may be down, but ever more millions of antelope are slaughtered to feed a commercial bushmeat trade in the continent’s fastgrowing, impoverished cities. With things as they are, this will be an eternal game of whack-a-mole, or at least until Africa’s last giraffe is eaten and its last tree is cut down to make charcoal.
Shamini Jayanathan is a British criminal barrister who practiced at the bar for 15 years in the Crown Courts, before
Her Majesty’s Government took her on
“Corruption is rife and the law remains arbitary in a country like Zimbabwe”
as a legal adviser on counter-terrorism in Somalia and some other extremely dangerous places. From there she pivoted to working on criminal justice in the field of wildlife, and for a decade she has worked with dedication to improve criminal courts and prosecutions across Africa. Jayanathan also takes time to advise the conservation group in my wildlife-rich home district of Laikipia in northern Kenya.
Incredibly, this courageous lawyer (whose Tamil family left Sri Lanka as it spiralled into civil war) is almost alone in her field advising courts and prosecutors across Africa. For years, she has pioneered ways to improve the accountability of prosecutions, fair and speedy trials and proper criminal sentencing. Accountability in Africa’s courts is incredibly important, because otherwise people will have no confidence in the courts as a reliable deterrent against crime. Corruption is rife and the law remains arbitrary in a country like Zimbabwe, where one man was fined $100 for poaching a python, while a second offender was sent to jail for nine years for the same crime only a few weeks later.
“The courts are too slow, prosecution services are still maturing and it’s too easy to delay or corrupt the criminal trial process,” Jayanathan tells me. “Even when you get a conviction there’s no predictable outcome.” In other words, the rich man who can pay bribes walks free, while the poor man languishes in an overcrowded cell for many years.
In countries all the way from Kenya to Namibia, her work with African authorities has had a dramatic impact and you can observe that in recent years there’s been a clear improvement in the protection of wildlife while bringing criminals to justice. In Kenya, for example, I believe Jayanathan deserves a share of the credit for the fact that there has been no rhinos poached for several years — in stark contrast to South Africa — while trafficking in elephant ivory is also way down.
An extraordinary dividend of her efforts is that the improvement in the way poachers are dealt with has a multiplier effect on the rule of law in general. Helping judges and prosecutors do a better job on wildlife is a Trojan horse that also improves their abilities to tackle other crimes from murder to armed robbery.
Using her experience as a barrister to export British ideas and principles that are based on centuries of jurisprudence has certainly benefited our rule of law in Kenya and Africa. To my mind, she is a heroine in the fight to save wildlife who deserves a medal, yet her contribution has not yet been properly recognised.