North Korea in Africa: Rogue traders

North Korea’s diplomats in Africa have been trading endangered animals for the past 30 years, a report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime has revealed. Embassy staff based in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa have been repeatedly abusing the immunity of the ‘diplomatic bag’, as set out in the 1961 Vienna […]

U.N. trafficking resolution passed

It has long been known that wildlife crime, be it trafficking or poaching, is committed by organised, transnational criminal gangs. The global illegal wildlife market is estimated at $10 to $20 billion dollars by Interpol, with links and trade routes that snake across the global – the majority of which lead to and from Southeast […]

Illegal Trade: Does Kasane signal the end of the beginning?

On March 25th, representatives of over 30 countries met at the Kasane Conference on Illegal Wildlife Trade, and adopted the Kasane Statement to reaffirm their commitment to ending the illegal wildlife trade. The conference was organised by the Government of Botswana with the support of the UK government, and included measures to ‘eradicate the market […]

China: Leizhou, where they butcher tigers

Something I recall having seen on Xinhua (新华网) last year (2014) was a report of tigers being butchered on the street in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, in a town called Leizhou (雷州市). The pictures you can find if you search 雷州市宰杀老虎 (Leizhou City slaughter tigers) are particularly shocking, with the corpses of tigers […]

China bans ivory imports … for 1 year

China has released a notification via CITES that it intends to suspend the import of ivory carvings from February 26th 2015 to February 26th 2016. This affects the ivory that is legally imported into the country – an apparently negligible amount – and the measure has no bearing on the massive illegal ivory trade that […]

Spilled Water

覆水难收

Illegal Trade