Library:Dirty Money: The Role of Corruption in Enabling Wildlife Crime (report)
Dirty Money: The Role of Corruption in Enabling Wildlife Crime is a report by the Wildlife Justice Commission published in July 2023. It presents case examples to illustrate how corruption facilitates the movement of wildlife shipments along the supply chain and how it can obstruct the criminal justice response, allowing criminal networks to operate with impunity. The report aims to assist law enforcement and policy makers to understand how corrupt acts can present in relation to wildlife crime, identify points of potential corruption risk in the wildlife trade supply chain, and consider practical measures that could be taken to mitigate and address these risks. It also highlights the harm caused by corruption and urges strong action to counter it.
Conclusions
The report highlights the need to address corruption risks in the supply chain to combat wildlife crime effectively. Corruption enables criminal networks, making it essential to minimize corrupt practices to reduce opportunities for wildlife crime. Various international agreements offer preventative and criminal justice approaches, but more efforts are needed to implement tangible actions on the ground. The interconnected nature of wildlife crime and corruption necessitates integrated law enforcement responses, including intelligence analysis, specialized investigations, international cooperation, and information sharing. To tackle criminal networks involved in wildlife crime, cooperation among source, transit, and destination countries is crucial. Applying existing law enforcement tools in a coordinated manner is essential to combat this problem and prioritize targeted action to reduce corruption's impact on institutions, the environment, and human life.