Joint effort key to curb poaching(2)

One of its members is Adan Alio from Kenya, an officer with Lusaka Agreement Task Force. He said the main efforts are to track and dismantle criminal networks.

"Until the top criminals behind the chains are taken down, the poaching and illegal trade will continue," he said.

Wan added: "We applied the experiences from previous operations by the International Criminal Police Organization (better known as Interpol), and the World Customs Organization to the current situation.

"By using the communication networks of all relevant sub-regional, regional and international partner institutions, we were able to coordinate forces from each country to exchange information, intercept goods, and carry out investigations."

Tens of thousands of wildlife, customs and police officers in all the countries participated in the Cobra operation, which helped launch more than 200 wildlife criminal cases, and arrest more than 100 suspects, as well as confiscate huge numbers of wildlife and plants.

Uttam Kumar Karkee, a senior superintendent from the Nepal police, said international cooperation such as this is vital in fighting wildlife crime.

"Operation Cobra proved itself to be an excellent model for fighting trans-national crime," he said.

Wan added: "Confidentiality is crucially, as is speed — efforts like this have to be done quickly and over a short space of time.

"That's why all the member states agreed not to disclose any information to the media before the cases were wound up."

On the Chinese side, up to 10,000 wildlife, customs and police officers were involved in the operation, resulting in 90 arrests connected to 80 individual cases.

Within each member country, too, similar locally targeted efforts were made

A World Wide Fund for Nature report released last year, the Wildlife Crime Scorecard, assessed the performance of 23 countries on their compliance to the CITES's commitment at protecting against crime involving tigers, rhinos, and elephants. 

Many countries were scored "red", indicating major deficiencies in compliance and enforcement, mostly for regulatory deficiencies and lack of enforcement resources regarding domestic ivory markets. 

In Asia the red countries included Laos, Myanmar and Thailand.

The report suggested various ways to improve domestic compliance, including the introduction of national policies, strengthening law enforcement, greater international coordination, improved data collection for wildlife crime analysis, and the introduction of heftier penalties that would constitute a credible deterrents and raise public awareness.

"Educating the public is also essential, and has proved very effective in the past," Wan said.