IELP Goes to Thailand to Protect Endangered Species

Prof. Chris Wold, Director of the Law School’s International Environmental Law Project (IELP), and three Lewis & Clark law students are in Bangkok, Thailand helping the 166 member governments make decisions to protect species from overutilization due to international trade. They are participating in the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the second CITES meeting in a row in which IELP students have participated. IELP will provide daily reports from the meeting, which takes place October 2-14.

“This is such a great opportunity for our students to see how international environmental law is made, especially at a CITES meeting where decisions are taken by vote as well as by consensus,” Prof. Wold said. “The CITES conferences are major environmental events because they produce enforceable decisions and practical actions for conserving wild nature and the Earth’s biological diversity", said Executive Director Klaus Toepfer of the United Nations Environment Programme, which administers the CITES Secretariat.

In addition to the traditional fights over elephant ivory and whale meat trade, Wold also expects close votes on two marine species, the great white shark and the humphead wrasse, because some countries, led by Japan and Norway, do not want to see marine species regulated by CITES, regardless of the species’ biological status. After the successful protection of mahogany at the last meeting, timber-producing states are lined up to fight the proposal to protect 30 species of ramin, important tropical timber species from southeast Asia, many of which are considered vulnerable due to overexploitation, illegal logging, and illegal international trade.

Despite the excitement caused by the proposals to protect specific species, IELP will focus on implementation and compliance mechanisms that may affect the convention for years to come. For example, CITES has proposed to replace its ad hoc compliance regime for a formal one. Progress towards a formal compliance mechanisms helps modernize the way CITES assists and penalizes governments for failing to implement CITES adequately. However, Erica Thorson, a third-year IELP member who will attend the meeting, reports that the proposal “may be designed to weaken efforts at compliance and to reduce the use of the convention’s most potent weapon: trade sanctions. We will have to fight to preserve the old system’s sticks in the new formal compliance regime.”

IELP will also work to simplify the way the convention defines the exception for plants and animals acquired before the convention came into effect for that species. Brenda Roberts, a 2003-2004 IELP member who will also attend the meeting, has already shaped the language that governments will vote on through her comments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the lead CITES agency of the United States. Brenda said, “I was delighted to see that the United States adopt our recommendations and it will be exciting to see language that I drafted put to a vote.”

Lastly, IELP will not ignore marine issues altogether. IELP has been working with governments and environmental groups to design the appropriate legal mechanisms to link the trade regime of CITES trade to the management regimes of regional fisheries treaties, including the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which manages the threatened Patagonian toothfish (“Chilean sea bass”) and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which has a voluntary program related to shark management. In addition, IELP will work on the development of a mechanism involving the permitting scheme for species taken on the high seas but then introduced into the jurisdiction of a CITES government. Deborah Scott, another 2003-2004 IELP member who will attend the meeting, noted, “This is one of those issues that only lawyers and law students could love, because you don’t get to champion the protection of any particular species. Instead, you are developing the underlying framework for ensuring that CITES creates an effective permitting scheme to discourage illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing of species, such as toothfish, that are caught on the high seas.”

Links

CITES Secretariat
13th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP13)