IELP CITES

International Environmental Law Project (IELP) Goes to CITES

Prof. Chris Wold, Director of the Law School's International Environmental Law Project (IELP), and four Lewis & Clark law students are in Santiago, Chile helping 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 international treaty with 158 participating countries. IELP will provide daily reports from the meeting, which takes place November 3-15.

"I am incredibly excited that four of our students will be able to participate in the CITES meeting and see how international environmental law is made, especially since this meeting will be very controversial due to several complex legal issues," Prof. Wold said. In addition to the usual and contentious battles over whether to allow international trade in whale meat and elephant ivory, governments have proposed to protect several commercially valuable marine species, including basking sharks and Patagonian toothfish ("Chilean sea bass"), which they have been reluctant to protect in the past.

Because many marine species like sharks and Patagonian toothfish are already managed by other international organizations, 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. "It's amazing that the governments do not understand the legal issues and how much they rely on environmental groups to provide important legal and biological information for their positions," commented Adam Lavinthal, who will represent Oceana, a U.S. based environmental group focusing on marine issues with which he is externing.

Mario Williams, a current IELP member who will represent IELP at the meeting, noted that the governments must do more to protect sharks. "Even though the World Conservation Union has included 75 shark taxa in its 2000 Red List of Threatened Species and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the future of many more shark populations 'is very bleak,' some governments don't want CITES to impose trade controls," Mario reported. "They would prefer voluntary compliance with an ineffective voluntary agreement."

Jennifer Amiott, a former IELP member who is externing in Argentina, will also represent IELP. She will observe the meeting to determine how CITES helps and hinders efforts of local communities to use wildlife sustainably. Sarah Baker, another former IELP member, will get the insider's view of the proceedings because she will attend the meeting as part of her Geneva-based externship with the CITES Secretariat, the administrative body of CITES.

Links

DAILY REPORTS