In two recent resolutions, on Central African Republic (res. 2134) and on the Democratic Republic of Congo (res. 2136), the UN Security Council authorized for the first time targeted sanctions against wildlife product traffickers and against persons and entities pulling the strings.
The resolutions were primarily targeting persons and entities supporting a number of armed rebel groups operating in the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the Central African Republic (the Lord Resistance Army and the Sudan’s Janjaweed militia). These armed groups are suspected by the United Nations to use the illegal ivory trade as a source of generating finances or otherwise to benefit from the illegal wildlife trade.
As will be shown in this paper, with these resolutions the Security Council de facto qualified wildlife poaching and trafficking as a ‘threat to the peace’ (given its role as a fuelling factor of the armed conflicts occurring in both DRC and CAR). Besides analyzing the content and legal relevance of the two resolutions, the paper will illustrate and discuss recent international and regional (normative) practice on illegal wildlife poaching and trafficking, highlighting it (also) as an emerging threat to human security.
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