Kenya Leads the way in Wildlife Crime Reporting System

The Hague, The Netherlands: – A wildlife crime reporting and sharing system developed by the international security agency Interpol is bursting organized cartels.
Kenya was the first recipient of the Ecomessage Award in 2004 and used its prize money to train its security officials.

Mr Julius Kimani, the Kenya Wildlife Service head of Wildlife Crime Investigations said his country conducted a two-week training in March 2005 for 30 KWS intelligence and investigation officers, four policemen and one officer from Lusaka Agreement and Customs each.

He said: “With such joint training, it becomes easy for various security agencies to relate in enforcing wildlife crime related laws.”

Kenya has been followed by Cameroon and Hong Kong which jointly won this year’s award at the ongoing 14th Conference of Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in The Hague.

The meeting has been on from June 2 and ends on June 15.

Interpol honoured the two countries last week in recognition of their extraordinary level of cooperation provided in the investigation surrounding the 3,900 kg cache of ivory smuggled out of Cameroon and seized in Hong Kong in May 2006.

Ecomessage was created by Interpol in the 1990s as a reporting system to improve sharing of wildlife crime information among international wildlife law enforcement agencies.

It was designed to facilitate the efficient transmission of critical data to the Interpol General Secretariat in Lyon, France.

This enables the Interpol General Secretariat to conduct an analysis that reveals the depth and breadth of this organizational structure, information which will be invaluable to a number of member countries in further enforcement work to combat the illegal trade.

Interpol’s Ecomessage Award comes with a prize sponsored by IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) valued at US$30,000.

During the presentation of the award last week, Mr Peter Younger, the Programme Manager for the Interpol Wildlife Crime programme said: “By recognizing Cameroon and Hong Kong as the 2007 award recipients, Interpol wishes to acknowledge that in utilising the Eco-message system, these countries were directly responsible for the dismantling of a significant organizational structure perpetrating the illegal trafficking of large amounts of raw ivory from Africa to Southeast Asia.”

The award was presented at an official reception held by Germany in The Hague, in its capacity as current President of the European Union and on the occasion of the 14th CITES Conference.

IFAW’s sponsorship of the Ecomessage Award and its collaboration with Interpol on the development of a guidebook on Ecomessage are provided in recognition of the costs of compliance with the reporting system as well as its significant benefits.
Interpol and IFAW both distribute an Ecomessage packet containing information and instructions on how to report in Interpol’s four working languages—Arabic, English, French and Spanish—to all CITES Management Authorities and selected wildlife law enforcement agencies worldwide.