Description
The ICCWC is the collaborative effort by five inter-governmental organisations working to bring coordinated support to the national wildlife law enforcement agencies and to the sub-regional and regional networks that act in defence of natural resources.
The mission of ICCWC is to usher in a new era where perpetrators of serious wildlife crimes will face a formidable and coordinated response, rather than the present situation where the risk of detection and punishment is all too low. In this context, ICCWC will mainly work for, and with, the wildlife law enforcement community, since it is frontline officers who eventually bring criminals engaged in wildlife crime to justice.
ICCWC comprises the CITES Secretariat, INTERPOL, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the World Bank and the World Customs Organisation (WCO). The CITES Secretariat chairs the alliance.
Each of the international organisations involved offers specialised expertise that can support national enforcement agencies and sub-regional and regional networks. Several of the organisations have already developed close working relationships on a bilateral or trilateral basis. The ICCWC organisations have experience in multi-national operations targeting illegal trade and smuggling, as well as comprehensive training and capacity-building for law enforcement officers. Several have communication channels that allow real-time dissemination of intelligence to help national enforcement bodies in their risk-assessment, targeting and profiling activities and to facilitate investigations in different countries. Before the concept of ICCWC, the five organisations had not worked in unison.
In the mid- to longer-term, ICCWC is uniquely placed to successfully develop programmes to
- Enhance awareness of wildlife crime
- Provide institutional analysis and support
- Build capacity of national institutions, sub-regional and regional enforcement organisations, taking into consideration the whole range of investigative and prosecutorial techniques
- Foster coordinated enforcement actions
- Support analytic reviews, especially through its Wildlife and Forest Crime Analytic Toolkit
- Mainstream wildlife crime across relevant national agencies
- Promote natural resource management and development
- Understand and address drivers of wildlife crime
- Address the drivers of wildlife crime to reduce demand
The Wildlife and Forest Crime Analytic Toolkit
The Wildlife and forest crime analytic toolkit is intended to serve as an initial entry point for national governments, international actors, practitioners and scholars to better understand the complexity of the wildlife and forest crime, and to serve as a framework around which a prevention and response strategy can be developed.
The Toolkit is designed to assist government officials in forestry and wildlife administration, customs and other relevant enforcement agencies by providing a technical resource to undertake a national assessment of the main issues relating to wildlife and forest offences and to analyse preventive and criminal justice responses at the national level.
It consists of five parts, featuring the analysis of:
- Legislation relevant to wildlife and forest offences and other illicit activities;
- Law enforcement measures pertaining to wildlife and forest offences;
- Prosecutorial and judicial capacities to respond to wildlife and forest crime;
- Factors that drive wildlife and forest offences, and the effectiveness of preventive interventions, and;
- The availability, collection and examination of data and other information relevant to wildlife and forest crime.
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