WORKSHOP NOTES INCREASING TRANSPARENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS IN WILDLIFE CRIME PROSECUTIONS April 12-13, 2018; WWF Island House, Hong Kong This document summarizes a workshop which brought together specialists from the Asia and Africa regions to discuss strategies and approaches for improve transparency and effective outcomes in wildlife crime cases. That such a workshop would be useful is supported by a review of the institutional and political response in most Asian and African states to an intensifying wildlife crime crisis in those regions. When doing so, it becomes quickly apparent that problems in appropriately applying and consistently realizing the penalties called for by existing legislation usually outweigh shortcomings in the content of laws themselves. In some jurisdictions successful or meaningfully punitive prosecutions for cases of wildlife crime fall below 10%. This makes participation in such criminal activities a very low-risk bet, and does little to dissuade those who would seek to profit from it. It is hoped that the results of the pre-workshop questionnaire and the content of the 16 presentations contained in this document will help shed more light on the most common impediments to successful convictions of wildlife criminals, as well as the unique challenges faced in some of the jurisdictions in which these experts operate. Encouragingly, early evidence from programs initiated in the Africa region within the last decade (Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Cameroon) already appear to be affecting significant improvement in conviction rates and sentences for serious wildlife offences. These programs generally share a number of characteristics. They usually begin with a review of recent wildlife crime case decisions in a given jurisdiction or country, and then seek to use the findings to guide training and policy responses. In many cases this is then supplemented with active court room monitoring. That such an approach should be replicated in other countries – particularly those in the Asia region – was one of the key conclusions of the workshop.
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