Page 42 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

edward van asch

gal animal or plant specimens are delivered to illegal markets, unscrupulous
dealers and mostly uninformed consumers, often many thousands of kilome-
tres away. This highlights a fourth key issue that needs to be addressed: the need
for range, transit and destination States to work together across the entire illegal
trade chain, to put an end to this highly destructive criminal activity.

Combatting illicit wildlife trafficking presents major challenges, but the
positive news is that there is a global collective effort underway to combat it and
we are witnessing encouraging progress both at national and international level.

Since 2010 and through the International Consortium on Combatting
Wildlife Crime (known as ICCWC), the CITES Secretariat, INTERPOL, the
UN Office of Drugs and Crime, the World Bank and the World Customs
Organization have scaled up their collective efforts to ensure that wildlife crimes
are met with a more coordinated law enforcement response to address the issues
identified above. ICCWC is not a new organisation, but rather an umbrella
under which these five organisations work together and align their efforts using
the specific strengths and areas of expertise of the different partners.

For the past 5 years, ICCWC has delivered a growing number of key acti-
vities, including the development of vital tools and the provision of crucial ser-
vices for the law enforcement community, to support authorities around the
world to respond effectively to the threat posed by transnational organized wil-
dlife crime. Efforts are for example currently underway to develop training
materials on anti-money laundering with a focus on wildlife crime, to imple-
ment the ICCWC Wildlife and Forest Crime Analytic Toolkit in around 20
countries – the Toolkit is a comprehensive national analysis evaluating every
single aspect of wildlife crime and its national responses, so that develop targe-
ted responses can be developed based on the findings. We have also developed,
among others an indicator framework on wildlife and forest crime for countries
to be able to measure and monitor their enforcement efforts, responses and
capacity to counter wildlife crime, or guidelines and training videos on for
example, ivory sampling procedures. ICCWC is also providing specialized trai-
ning as well as technical and operational support such as for example through
the deployment of WISTs - Wildlife Incident Support Teams - to in the UAE,
Sri Lanka and Madagascar to assist with investigations, capacity assessment and

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