By Kelly Rwamapera
A data analysis investigation has landed on a startling trend in ivory trafficking in Rwanda: for nearly a decade, no major ivory dealers have faced prosecution.
According to data from the #WildEye map, most court cases involve impoverished individuals from border communities who collect ivory from neighboring countries on behalf of unidentified larger traffickers in the country.
Arrests typically occur during the collection or delivery phases, often involving transactions with unidentified buyers.
Notably, data from the Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) indicates that nearly half of all ivory trafficking arrests fail to advance to prosecution.
Data from both the prosecution and the Rwanda Investigation Bureau also show that nearly half of the ivory trafficking arrests don’t make it to the prosecutors.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) recommends arrests of top players in ivory trafficking as a way of destroying the market and deterring wildlife crime.
In the 2021 report that examined market dynamics and prices of products in illegal wildlife trade, GI-TOC said that “reduced poaching [in East and Southern Africa between 2014 and 2020 was] a result of the arrests and prosecutions of a large number of transnational organized criminal networks,”
The central African country that is also a member of the East African Community bloc has just over a hundred elephants in the highly guarded Akagera National Park, one of the smallest savannah parks in the region.
Examining the available ivory trafficking cases in Rwanda leaves a trail of questions about who buys the ivory from the ordinary grassroots people who get arrested and how the ivory from Rwanda gets into the global streams of ivory trafficking.
In January 2024, the Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) reported that the investigators had handled 23 ivory trafficking cases between 2018 and 2023, involving some 104 unmeasured pieces of ivory.
In the same period, the Rwanda prosecution handled 13 cases of ivory trafficking involving 47 kilograms and 13 unmeasured pieces of ivory, according to #WildEye data obtained from the Rwanda prosecution.
The case files that the prosecution received are as few as almost 50 per cent of the cases that the Rwanda Investigation Bureau handled.
With this discrepancy, Intego News submitted information requests to the Rwanda Investigation Bureau to know if there are challenges in, among others, collecting incriminating evidence that the prosecutors need to handle an ivory trafficking case.
Intego News also requested the Rwanda Investigation Bureau to comment on our findings that no top player in fueling ivory trafficking in Rwanda got prosecuted.
The Rwanda Investigation Bureau didn’t give a reply to all the requests made since early April 2024.
According to the investigation and data analyses we have made, fewer cases, mostly of locals who are too ignorant to run a transnational crime, make it from investigators to the prosecution.
This investigation also understands that while there are ordinary locals in Rwanda who face prosecution for possession of ivory, no top players who buy ivory from the convicted locals have faced prosecution.
Ange Imanishimwe, the Executive Director at BIOCOOR, a local non-government Organisation advocating for biodiversity conservation, told Intego News that some ‘big men’ in the past fueled wildlife crimes but commented that it’s not the case today.
“We’re aware that ivory trafficking, like other wildlife crimes, involved some big people in Rwanda who used to lure ordinary locals into wildlife crimes, but the government of Rwanda has abolished such,” he said.
He, however, commented that in the organization’s work of sensitizing people against wildlife crime, [they] “engage both grassroots people and those in high positions,”
In 2022, Rwanda adopted the Rapid Reference Guide (RRG), which guides handling wildlife crime from the time of investigation to court.
The toolkit emphasizes, among others, finding the buyer who fuels wildlife crimes in cases of arrests for sellers.
According to the toolkit, the arrest of the buyers not only stands as evidence to convict the seller and vice versa but also to break the market dynamics that fuel wildlife crime.
In a judicial press conference in February 2024, the RIB Director General Jeannot Ruhunga commented that law enforcement had yet to start training on using the Rapid Reference Guide in handling wildlife crime.
“We have not had training on the use of the toolkit guide. We’re doing so many other important things concerning handling wildlife crime,”
According to research by Education for Nature – Vietnam, from the beginning of 2023 to the end of September 2023, the center recorded 243 cases showing signs of violation related to ivory mostly from African countries.
During the first three months of 2023, Vietnamese customs seized over 8 tons of ivory at Hai Phong port in Northern Vietnam, originating from African countries especially Angola and Nigeria.
Ivory has been smuggled in large quantities from Africa to Asia, methodically organized under the guise of import-export businesses, and even using “ghost” businesses to challenge the expertise, experience, intelligence and technology of the law enforcement.
This story was produced in partnership with InfoNile with funding from the Earth Journalism Network. A journalist from Vietnam who requested anonymity to protect their safety contributed reporting from East Asia.
