Stolen Wildlife - Closing the Gaps in the International Legal Framework

Stolen Wildlife

Closing the Gaps in the International Legal Framework

John E Scanlon AO

Chair, Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime

13 January 2021

A recording of the event is available here. 

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Thank you, Jo and Martin, and thank you to the MEPs Wildlife Group, Pro Wildlife and HIS Europe for organising today’s event. It is very timely - and thank you for inviting me to address the gaps in the international legal framework.

We are all experiencing this COVID-19 pandemic together, and it has reminded us, albeit in a devastating way, of the interconnected nature of things, most particularly between economies, the environment, and human and wildlife health and welfare.

We clearly need to recalibrate our relationship with nature and this observation also applies to wildlife trade – be it legal, illegal, regulated, or unregulated. Wildlife issues are not just about conservation, they are also about public and animal health and welfare, and if we get it wrong, it can have massive global implications.

The fact that viruses can spillover from certain wild animals to people through wildlife trade, markets and consumption is now very high in our collective consciousness, and late last year the IPBES told us that 1.7 million undiscovered viruses are thought to exist in wild animals, of which about half could spillover to people.

We have seen some countries moving ahead to take stricter measures to address these risks, which is great but to be effective we need a global response. These wildlife-related health risks, and efforts to combat wildlife crime, must be addressed through international cooperation and international laws.

So, are our current international laws fit for purpose in a post-COVID-19 world? Sort answer, no.

Our current international regime for regulating wildlife trade and combating wildlife crime, including illegal wildlife trade, is inadequate both for regulating the trade, markets, and consumption that pose a risk to public health, as well as for ending wildlife crime. They do not reflect the interconnected nature of things. Rather, they reflect the siloed approach of the 1970s.

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Looking first very briefly at legal, regulated trade.

CITES, the global wildlife trade regulator, was negotiated and signed in the early 1970s. It was designed to address the over-exploitation of wildlife through international trade and it developed a robust international regime to ensure that trade in a listed species did not threaten its survival. It is not perfect, but it does this quite well.

But CITES was never designed to address the public and animal health aspects of wildlife trade. It addresses the impact of trade on the survival of a listed species at its source, not its potential impacts on human and animal health once taken and transported to other countries. And as Sandra said, it applies to a limited number of species.

CITES narrow focus on overexploitation was sound when the Convention was signed in 1973, but it cannot be sustained in a post-COVID-19 world. Today we need to take a ‘One Health’ approach to wildlife trade.

We can do this by adopting amendments to CITES that build public and animal health criteria into its decision-making processes, thereby making CITES a contemporary and relevant Convention for a post-COVID-19 world.

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Now, turning to the illegal wildlife trade, which is my focus today.

Over the past few decades concerns over wildlife trade shifted from not just being about over-exploitation through trade, but with illegal trade. These are crimes that deprive governments of revenue, degrade ecosystems and their ability to sequester carbon, and exacerbate corruption, insecurity, and poverty and pose a threat to public and animal health.

Illegal trade in CITES-listed species is valued at about $20 billion annually. But CITES covers just 38,000 of the world’s eight million species. If we consider all species, including fish and timber species, that are being trafficked and its impacts on ecosystems, the World Bank puts this figure at a staggering $1-2 trillion a year.

And as more restrictions are placed on wildlife trade, markets, and consumption that could pose a risk to public health, we will need to scale up our enforcement efforts to ensure such trade does not simply move underground.

However, notwithstanding these massive and highly destructive crimes, there is no global agreement on wildlife crime, as there is for example on human trafficking.

CITES has been heavily relied upon but it was not designed to deal with wildlife crime, it is a trade-related convention, not a crime-related convention. However, in the absence of any other instrument, and facing a surge in trafficking, we made the best possible use of it. And we did well – and the European Union played a big part in this collective effort, including through its strong support for ICCWC. 

But we have stretched CITES mandate to the limit – we need to do more if we are to win this fight. We need to look to all species being trafficked, not just the species protected under CITES, and to embed combatting wildlife crime where it belongs, namely into the international criminal law framework.

We can do this by developing a fourth Protocol on wildlife crime under the UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (UNCTOC).

The Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime, which I Chair, has releaseed details on the form and content of a possible new Protocol on wildlife crime, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.

The draft Protocol of wildlife crime sets out a range of commitments to combat and prevent illicit wildlife trafficking. The Protocol would:

 - embed combating these serious crimes into the international criminal law framework and set out the conduct that is to be criminalised.

- apply to any species of wild fauna or flora, including fish and timber, that is protected under international and, importantly, any national law.

- make it a criminal offence to import any wildlife, or wildlife product into a country if it had been acquired in contravention of the national laws of the source country. It would represent a remarkable expression of comity between nations; a mutual respect for one another’s laws. This picks up on Martin’s and Sandra’s opening remarks. 

- support raising public awareness of these crimes and demand reduction efforts to help prevent them, as well as sharing information, such as on known groups active in illicit trafficking, on their concealment methods, known transport routes, and on sharing forensics, the role and responsibilities of the carriers of contraband, on the verification of documents, and on training and technical assistance; and it would

- automatically trigger all the tools available under the UNTOC.

If adopted, such a Protocol would be the first time that a crime that has a significant impact on the environment is specifically embedded into the international criminal law framework – signifying a powerful and unequivocal acknowledgment by States of the importance of preventing and combating these serious crimes, in recognition of their devastating consequences for wildlife, livelihoods, economies, security, entire ecosystems, including their ability to sequester carbon, as well as to public and animal health – and of the need to seriously scale up our collective response if we want to end them.

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Colleagues, looked at overall, left as it is our system is not going to prevent the next pandemic. It could, in fact, be raising our potential exposure to zoonotic diseases.

CITES was ground-breaking in its day and our predecessors showed great ambition and courage to negotiate such an agreement in the 1970s.

But it’s now 2021. We live in a post-COVID-19 world – and we simply cannot allow a wildlife trade regime to prevail that fails to include public and animal health into its decision making, nor can we stand by and watch wildlife crimes continue to escalate without scaling up our international response.

The youth of this world is taking a massive hit from this pandemic. We owe it to them to pass on a legal framework that is fit for purpose, one that gives us the best chance of avoiding future wildlife-related pandemics and ending these highly destructive wildlife crimes.

In doing so, we will need to show the same level of ambition and courage as our predecessors did back in the 1970s, and the EU is very well placed to take a lead role in doing so.

Thank you.