Justin's Adventures

The Ostrich

This week I have mainly be doing my finances..

After ten weeks in India, China and a load of other countries that don't seem to have heard of 'paper', I seem to have come back with hundreds of sheets of faded tissue masquerading as receipts.  From these I am supposed to work out what I spent, compare that to how much money EIA gave me to travel around the world with and ideally there shouldn't be much difference.

So when I worked out that I should have about 900 quid left over and actually have twenty-five I was a bit worried.

My philosophy of 'well there's not much you can do about it' was not much help! It reminded me of the time I received a tax bill for £11,000. I actually laughed thinking that either it was a terrible mistake or I was, er, fucked. Either way, not much that can be done. ha ha.

Anyway after finding numerous activities to distract myself from the spreadsheet I had another look last night and solved the problem in my favour by finding that EIA had given me a grand less than I thought.

So now I'm in a happy, productive mood and can write inspiring blog entries (instead of actually finishing my cash reconciliation if course).

For your information everyone, 20 multiplied by 50 is 1000. Not 2000! I hope that little gem will be of help to you all.

Organised Crime

I just returned from Vienna. Lovely city but once again pretty much saw the inside of a conference centre and the hotel. I guess the Blue Danube was pretty impressive and city was very pretty. Oh and the wine bars, and the cheese!!

So once again to catch up and give the nine (there are only nine people who read this site - I'm convinced of it!) something to read, here is a post I did for the EIA website:

DAILY BLOG - ORGANISED CRIME: TIGER CAMPAIGN TEAM AT THE UN.

Copyright Justin Gosling/EIA

"MIND THE GAP"

EIA Investigator Justin Gosling reports from UN Conference against Transnational Organised Crime CoP in Vienna.

You will know that here at EIA, we address the protection of endangered species from many directions, but the focus of our most recent report "Skinning The Cat - Crime and Politics of the Big Cat Skin Trade" is the lack of enforcement by authorities that should be taking action. The report explains that the illicit trade in tiger and leopard skin falls clearly within the definitions of “organised crime”.

Following last weeks CITES Standing Committee in Geneva, EIA is once again back at the United Nations, this time in Vienna at the Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (CTOC).

CTOC deals with many examples of Transnational Organised Crime including drug trafficking, trafficking in human beings and trafficking in firearms, all of which are understandably priorities for the Convention that also acknowledges “the range of organized crime activities has broadened and diversified. The traditional hierarchical forms of organized crime groups have diminished; replaced with loose networks who work together in order to exploit new market opportunities. For example organized crime groups involved in drug trafficking are commonly engaged in smuggling of other illegal goods.”

The UN General Assembly at its 62nd Plenary Meeting was “strongly convinced” of the role of the Convention against Transnational Organised Crime in combating the illicit trafficking of endangered species of wild flora and fauna.

Last week we were disappointed that CITES, the UN body tasked with controlling the trade in endangered species, failed to adopt the maximum measures available to them to save the wild tiger.

Struggling to find a body with the remit and resources to drive enforcement, EIA’s Tiger Team have come to see to what extent CTOC addresses the issue.
Short answer: they don’t!

EIA are here to remind the Convention that this trade is a high profit – low risk activity that could make it highly desirable to criminals. Indeed, there are links between trafficking in wildlife products and trafficking of human beings.

So how did we remind the convention of this? We just plain told them! On Tuesday, EIA’s Tiger Team Leader Debbie Banks addressed the Plenary Session. As the only environmental NGO present, EIA took the lead once again by reminding the Convention that wildlife crime networks operate in areas of social instability and conflict, using the same border crossings, official and unofficial, as criminals engaged in other forms of serious crime that this Convention concerns itself with.

Debbie told them, “We believe it is of paramount importance that illegal trafficking of endangered species remains on the agenda of this Convention. We respectfully appeal to the Member States to consider the matter at this Conference of the Parties and at future sessions.”

The intervention clearly generated some thought amongst the Parties, and many of the 200 copies of “Skinning The Cat” which we hauled over to Vienna will now end up far and wide around the globe.

But CTOC has many priorities and the illicit trade in endangered species is not one of them. They assume that someone else will deal with it - maybe CITES. But as we learnt last week, enforcement is not a priority for CITES. With neither CITES nor CTOC effectively addressing the issue of enforcement of illicit trade in endangered species, the tiger is one of many falling through the gap.

Nevertheless, EIA has made progress here in Vienna. We have made contacts within member Parties and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) who are sympathetic to our concerns and willing to help. EIA will continue to work with interested parties with the aim to bringing them together to search the common ground on this issue.

Preservation of habitats, arrest and prosecution of poachers and raising awareness of issues are essential activities in protecting the tiger and other endangered species, but be under no illusion that this trade is being driven by resourceful individuals in organised criminal networks who are getting very rich at the expense of species which have no time to wait for politicians to do more than talk, quit arguing and start acting.

We all have to act fast. It’s not too late to start bridging the gap – but the tiger is perilously close to the edge.

(The above text and photograph copyright Justin Gosling/EIA)

CITES in Geneva

I went to Geneva the week before last to the Standing Committee of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Speices (CITES ). My first one, it was an interesting insight into how politics affects the survival of a species. Interesting but not impressive.

For the EIA website I wrote a blog (yes, blogs coming out of my ears). Here is the text:

Wednesday 4th October 2006

'Out of the frying pan – into the pot'.

EIA investigator, Justin Gosling, reports on the politics of tiger conservation.

Just over a month ago I was carrying out field investigations for our Tiger Campaign. The day-to-day, minute-by-minute decisions, which can affect an operation and more critically, the safety of the operatives, were foremost in my mind, not least because there was so much at stake.

The expectations of EIA’s supporters for us, on their behalf to make a difference to the dire situation for wild tigers only increased the pressure on the team. I vividly remember one day undercover photographing hundreds of people wearing tiger and leopard skin whilst they talked and laughed with police officers and army soldiers clad in riot gear. The consequences had I been discovered were severe, but this evidence gathering was essential in order to effect the future of the illegal trade in big cat skin.

Here in Geneva at the 54th CITES Standing Committee I could not be further away from the world of clandestine investigations and dangerous traders. But this is where those investigations really matter. It is here that the representatives from the Parties to CITES meet to discuss the business of the Convention and where critical decisions on trade bans and stockpile sales are made.

Our latest report “Skinning The Cat – Crime and Politics of The Big Cat Skin Trade” has been the source of heated interest amongst our friends in other NGO’s and understandably within those who we criticised in the report, primarily China. The report is the product of two years of challenging investigations and disturbing revelations into the continuing skin trade.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, it evidences how the trade in tiger and leopard skin continues to flourish with skins from India travelling across Nepal into China. Undercover investigators were offered a number of skins, some openly on sale in shops in Lhasa, TAR, Linxia, Gansu Province and Kanding in Sichuan Province.

To dowload a copy of our report, please click on this link: www.eia-international.org/cgi/reports/reports.cgi?t=template&a=129

The lack of enforcement to stop the trade is one of our prime concerns and the authorities in the consumer states are understandably defensive. So much so that on Monday a member of the Chinese delegation took thirty copies of our report 'Skinning The Cat' and threw them into a rubbish skip. My surveillance skills were put to effective use as I followed him, photographed the evidence and retrieved the reports so that they could be ‘recycled’ and put in the hands of concerned individuals.

These are the lengths that some individuals will go to in an attempt to prevent the findings of EIA’s tenacious investigators being revealed to the decision makers within CITES.

As I write this, the conference is debating species-specific issues including elephants and tigers. The tension is high as EIA along with a number of other respected and influential NGO’s are poised to deliver a joint intervention to the conference in relation to issues concerning enforcement activities by tiger range states and consumer countries. We wrote the statement over the last few days and finalised it in a Mexican restaurant last night. The language is spicy but the detail is critical and we deliberated over it until late into the evening.

This may not be the front line for endangered species, but it is most certainly a battleground where tact, diplomacy and careful strategy are essential weapons in the ongoing fight to save the tiger.

 

 

FILE DOWNLOADS

Tiger Intervention at CITES
PDF File [18.61 K]   DOWNLOAD

(The above post, and linked reports are copyright Justin Gosling/EIA. Photograph: Litang Festival 2006 - copyright Justin Gosling/EIA/WPSI)