Wildlife trafficking - Introduction

From this general observation, it follows that a fight against wildlife trafficking requires close cooperation between all authorities which may be concerned by such trafficking, such as customs authorities, police, inspection services, scientific and technical bodies, prosecutors and judges. However, such continuous and close cooperation does not always exist. Rather, coordination and cooperation is differently organised within states and this also applies to the necessary cooperation with the authorities of other states. Administrative inertia, linguistic difficulties, lack of human or administrative resources - there are numerous reasons for a lack of effective cooperation within a state or beyond national borders. Also, though organised crime plays an important role in the illegal trade in endangered species, the authorities responsible are not always aware of the activities of bodies which specialise in the fight against organised crime and fail to get them involved in time.

The result of all this is that the detection rate of wildlife trafficking is low. The European Commission reported in its Communication on the EU approach against wildlife trafficking that within the EU, there are some 2,500 seizures of animal or plant specimens per year. Estimations of the real amount of trafficking are difficult, but it might well be that this figure represents not even one per cent of actual illegal wildlife trade in the EU.

Also the judiciary in all countries, including the EU, acts within national borders and according to national legislation on sanctions, seizures etc. In the majority of countries, sanctions pronounced in cases of wildlife trafficking are not a deterrent. In some countries, only administrative, but not criminal sanctions may be imposed. Often enough, courts or sanctioning administrations do not really know the value of the animal or plant item on the black market, are not aware of the systematic nature of illegal trafficking, or fix sanctions in the form of a specific amount of money. The imposing of a prison sentence for cases of wildlife trafficking remains the exception. No collection of judgments in wildlife trafficking cases exists and hardly any other form of systematic exchange of information allows prosecutors or judges to draw lessons from the experience of other cases.

Wildlife trafficking has become a global activity. As long as attempts to fight this activity remain largely uncoordinated and continue to differ strongly from one state or region to the other, the success of significantly reducing wildlife trafficking will remain limited.