Best wishes from the team!

Proposal for an IEL Interest Group for the African Elephant
_____________________________________________________________
The following is a proposal for an International Environmental Law Interest Group on African elephants. The Interest Group will harness the expertise of its members to confront a critical wildlife issue facing us today, through a rethinking of the use of international environmental law.
Background
The African elephant Loxodonta Africana is in danger of extinction. Over the past century African elephant populations have plunged to 470,000-690,000 individuals from a population of three to five million. According to a recent CITES report, an estimated 17,000 elephants were illegally killed in 2011 at monitored sites, meaning that the total killed for all of Africa is likely to reach over 25,000 elephants. Other sources estimate that one hundred elephants are being killed daily. Global illicit trade in ivory is at its highest level in 16 years and confiscations of hundreds of kilos of ivory point to the involvement of organized crime. Terrorist groups, including groups identifying with El Khayda, are also reportedly directly involved in the horrific onslaught.
Elephants are sentient beings. They live in matriarchal groups the members of which take care of each other and of their young in particular. They are highly emotional. They communicate with each other including through physical contact with each other, miss each other when separated and display happiness when reunited. Elephants care for their sick and wounded, have a sense of death and mourn the bones of dead family members. They are Earth’s largest territorial animal, a dubious honor that has lead to bitter land use conflicts leaving elephants as the losers. Weighing up to six tons elephants require vast amounts of land as habitats as well as enormous amounts of food. Beyond their ‘mammoth’ dimensions, elephants are cursed by their tusks. Human greed for ivory has made poaching the most threatening danger to elephants and the use of automatic weapons affords poachers the capacity to destroy entire herds.
Because of its critical status the African elephant has been listed in CITES Appendix I since 1989, but the populations of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe have since been transferred back to Appendix II. Sport hunting of elephants is permitted under the legislation of a number of Range States, and Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, all have CITES export quotas for elephant trophies.

CITES
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is the international regulator of the ivory trade. As such it has come under intense criticism for the catastrophic poaching of elephants that feeds the illegal ivory trade. CITES has been censured by international wildlife NGOs for failure to confront China and Thailand as the leading consumers of ivory, and from refraining to call for a ban on all ivory trade. It has been charged with creating the present elephant crisis by allowing one-off sales of ivory stocks that CITES allowed South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe to sell in 2008, an exception (together with another one-off sale in 1999) to the ban CITES imposed on trade in ivory in 1989. CITES denies links between the one-off sales and the increase in poaching. But wildlife organizations attribute the sharp increase to CITES’ allowing trade in stocked ivory through which illegal ivory is being traded as old stock. Arguably, a total ban on the ivory trade at both international and domestic scales will make tracking the illegal trade easier.
International Law and the elephant
Faced with impending extinction, international law has so far not only failed in protecting the elephant from massive poaching but has contributed to its deteriorating status by regulating trade in ivory rather than banning it totally. International law continues to treat the elephant as a tradable object. The innate predicament facing CITES lies in the use of international law to legitimize a trade that cannot be monitored, and to protect species not for the sake of the species but for their economic worth. A trade convention in endangered species is a contradiction in terms. Endangered species require absolute protection and trade in them should be outlawed rather than regulated. By differentiating between legal trade and illegal trade CITES encourages and facilitates the illicit international trade in ivory. In light of the failure of today’s biodiversity conventions (one of which is CITES) to stop and reverse the spiraling fall of the elephant into oblivion, is there a need for a new international agreement? And if so, how would it contend with the catastrophic situation? How should we ‘rethink’ current international agreements?
Invitation to the join the Interest Group
Accepting the extinction of the elephant as its inescapable fate portents a menacingly dangerous mindset, that extinctions are the unavoidable price of human take-over of the planet. Once the extinction of the elephant is believed inevitable, it would be swiftly followed by a rethinking of other species extinctions with profoundly frightening consequences. The elephant crisis is bringing the human relationship with other species to a head and whether governments are capable of summoning up the political will and the resources to prevent its extinction will determine the future of the human relationship with the biosphere.
Thus the motivation in establishing the Interest Group for Elephants is to attempt to defy the elephant’s fate through the use of international law. The Interest Group will be action-orientated. It will focus on the use of international law as a practical tool in confronting the elephant crisis, drawing on the expertise of its members in research, advocacy and activism in international environmental legal issues. Through networking we will gather information, define and analyze the factors behind the ongoing elephanticide and brainstorm on how international law can effectively respond to the dire situation. A key task awaiting the group is to evaluate the effectiveness of an international ban on the ivory trade. The Interest Group would consider promoting (and drafting) a new multilateral agreement that would incorporate an ivory trade ban and prohibit the killing of elephants inclusive of trophy hunting. The agreement would impose trade sanctions on contracting parties that continue to trade in ivory, and devise mechanisms to prevent non-member states from trading as well. It would call for the establishment of extensive elephant reserves subject to substantial funding to the relevant African countries. These reserves as well as other elephant habitats would be protected by forces trained to combat terrorist and criminal elephant poachers. Drawing on the experience and expertise of the group’s members, we would examine ‘best practice’ from other MEAs.

The Interest Group would further consider referring the African elephant crisis to the UN General Assembly for appropriate resolutions by means of sympathetic countries. Moreover, the international criminal and terrorist aspects of elephant poaching calls for referring the elephant crisis to the Security Council to consider use of its authorities in countering elephant poaching for the “maintenance of international peace and security”.

We invite other members of the IEL/IG to join us in establishing this group which will be coordinated by…..

References:
Michael J. Glennon, Has International Law Failed the Elephant? AJIL, 84:1, at1-43.

http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/elephants/human_elephant_conflict.cfm.

http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/12392/0.

Alex Shoumanoff, The Agony of Ivory, Vanity Fair, August 2011, at http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/08/elephants-201108.

Jeffrey Gettleman, Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy as Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits, New York Times, Sept 3, 2012, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/africa/africas-elephants-are-being-slaughtered-in-poaching-frenzy.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1&ref=jeffreygettleman.

http://www.cites.org/eng/news/pr/2012/20120731_SC62_results.php.

http://www.cites.org/eng/cop/16/doc/E-CoP16-53-01.pdf.

Environmental Investigation Agency,http://www.eia-international.org/eia-is-at-cites-next-week-heres-what-were-working-for.
CITES: Rhetoric and tiptoeing around elephant poaching, http://www.eia-international.org/cites-polite-rhetoric-and-tiptoeing-around-elephant-poaching.

EARTH NEGOTIATIONS BULLETIN, Summary of the sixteenth meeting of the conference of the parties to the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora, 3-14 March 2013, at http://www.iisd.ca/vol21/enb2183e.html.
David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, http://www.iworry.org/the-16th-conference-of-the-parties-to-cites-came-to-an-end-and-the-question-on-everyones-lips-is-what-measures-did-they-take-to-protect-elephants/.

Why is wildlife and forest crime a serious transnational organised crime?
http://www.eia-international.org/wp-content/uploads/CCPCJ-Brief-wildlife-forest-crime-FNL-WWF-EIA-TRAFFIC.pdf.
An alarming map of the global ivory trade that killed 17,000 elephants in one year Posted by Max Fisher on March 15, 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/15/an-alarming-map-of-the-global-ivory-trade-that-killed-17000-elephants-in-one-year/.

China must send a clear message to consumers on ivory trade, posted by Paula Kahumbu March 4, 2013 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/mar/04/china-message-consumers-ivory-trade.

The SHARES lectures are open to non-academics, on a first-come first-served basis.

I am very much interested in to attend the above mentioned lecture however I am not (yet) an academic or researcher. I am wondering if there is any limitation in relation to the number of the people who could go there or even regarding qualification.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,

Judit Dombi