Put checks on movement of game trophies

A Kenya Wildlife Service officer inspects eight pieces of ivory intercepted at Buxton Road in Mombasa on June 9, 2018. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • It is currently very hard to identify the source of seized consignments of illegal wildlife or forestry products.

Anyone in Kenya who does business outside the country, especially with American, British, or European customers, will be familiar with the three letters KYC.

Standing for ‘Know Your Customer’, this is the growing collection of laws, rules and regulations for international financial transactions designed to root out money laundering and illegal cash flows.

KYC compels banks and other financial institutions to identify who they are dealing with, and to assess the risk that their services might be used for illegal purposes.

Questions about reasons for certain transactions might be an irritation for people running legitimate businesses.

But KYC has become an important and effective safeguard against those who are not.

WILDLIFE

We now urgently need something similar not just for international movements of money, but for the import and export of products globally, too.

Space for Giants, the conservation organisation I work for, has just published the results of an extensive study of wildlife crime prosecutions in North Central Kenya.

Among evident progress on trial preparation and increasing convictions for ivory, sandalwood and rhino horn crimes - now at 67 per cent in the courts we surveyed - one finding stood out.

The majority of prosecutions are still focused on the poachers and low-level middlemen rather than any of the bigger players higher up the criminal networks.

Why don’t the bigger fish end up in court?

CHECKS

Chief among the reasons is it is currently very hard to identify the source of seized consignments of illegal wildlife or forestry products, or to track precisely where they were heading. This often stalls investigations.

Agents facilitating transactions and shipments hardly vet their customers or their consignments.

They are not compelled to collect sufficient, accurate information, and what they do collect is rarely comprehensive enough for investigations that may start long after the transaction.

Kenya should lead the world in tackling this with new legislation compelling import-export agents, shippers and brokers to ‘know their customers’, and carry out the same checks on their business as banks must for financial transactions.

TRANSIT ROUTES

This would be of deep benefit not just to conservation, but to all Kenyans.

New catch-all 'Know Your Customer' laws would make it far more complicated to move weapons, counterfeit medicines, drugs, stolen goods, and even people, as well as tusks, horns and scales.

Director of Public Prosecutions Noordin Haji agrees, saying that this idea comes at “an opportune time” as Kenya “aggressively counters organised crime, corruption, and terrorism”.

The impact on wildlife crime would be enormous, because Kenya is now one of the world’s great transit routes for illegal wildlife products.

Ms Jayanathan is the Director of Wildlife Protection at Space for Giants and a criminal barrister.