High stakes for members of new wildlife unit
Taking on global crime syndicates all in a day’s work
SAM Muller can’t reveal any information on his team’s landmark investigations into two criminal networks trafficking illicit ivory and rhino horn from Africa to Asia – he knows the stakes are so high, it could get his colleagues killed.
“Unfortunately, we can’t say anything about the cases we’re investigating,” says Muller, the director of the newly created Wildlife Justice Commission. “It would seriously jeopardise our activities and endanger the lives of our team members.”
But for those two cases, the end product is a case file that “exposes how the networks operate and the key perpetrators involved”. It’s the starting point to ensure the perpetrators “are held to account by governments and law enforcement agencies”.
The commission, founded by criminal justice and wildlife experts, was launched this week in response to the “alarming and exponential rise in wildlife crime”. Muller cites how in the past seven years, South Africa’s rhino death toll has skyrocketed from 13 animals poached every year to 1 251, an increase of almost 10 000 percent. “If we do nothing, wild rhinos will cease to exist this decade.”
There is a need for a wildlife body like the commission, which operates from The Hague, because “governments around the world systematically failed, and are failing, in confronting and combating wildlife crime”, he believes.
“Despite the fact that, at an international level, several organisations have described wildlife crime as a transnational organised crime that generates billions of dollars and undermines development, at a national level, for too many governments, combating wildlife crime is unfortunately not a priority and almost always remains overlooked and poorly understood, not to mention the absence of a real political will.”
In South Africa, and across the rest of the continent, “weak gover nance and widespread corruption remain two formidable obstacles for justice, especially for wildlife crime”.
Wildlife crime, by its nature, is international “as, along the supply chain, including transit countries, individuals with different nationalities are involved as brokers or middlemen, and the final buyers are far away from the origin countries, where ivory and rhino horn are sourced from”.
The commission plans to disrupt transnational wildlife crime networks “and support local processes to hold key perpetrators accountable” by seeking to address the problem in an entirely new way.
“Once we accept a case we further investigate and collect evidence on individuals, organisations and networks, to produce a map of facts that at first will be presented to the interested national authorities, to facilitate and trigger the activation of local justice.
“If this approach fails, we escalate the case at an international level, and with the collaboration of an accountability panel consisting of independent criminal law and wildlife crime experts, we present and discuss the map at a public hearing in The Hague, with all the details, before an independent panel of experts.
“If there is still no action after the hearing, the commission will mobilise a multinational network of government, business and law enforcement representatives to apply additional pressure. With this mechanism we aim to push governments to activate local justice while we monitor, of course, holding governments publicly accountable if they don’t do it, and disrupting the activities of traffickers and criminal networks.”
Muller and his team will use wildlife forensics and GPS to track illegal shipments to specifically focus on exposing and prosecuting the kingpins fuelling the trade.
“What the media call ‘kingpins’ are sometimes businessmen who have also legal activities and mix the two, working with, or being part of, transnational criminal organisations, and often with protection and collaboration from government entities and public officials.”
These are “connected, often wealthy” individuals who are able to obstruct justice and derail prosecutions in “several lawful and unlawful ways”.
“Individuals in these top positions can be heavily buffered from the hands-on business of ivory or rhino horn trafficking and their personal security can be robust. So it’s not easy to find evidence, witnesses and in general collaboration from people with information. It could be dangerous to report on them or help authorities,” he says.