The Analysis Of Illegal Cases On Ivory And The Study Of Countermeasures About Ivory Market In China

The art of ivory carving has a long and glorious history in China. With thousands of years' development, it has accumulated consummate technical skill, and become part of Chinese traditional culture. Today, it has been listed as the Intangible Cultural Heritage of China and accepts more and more recognition.In 1989, the 7th Conference of the Parties (CoP) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) raised all the Africa elephant population to Appendix I, which completely prohibited the international trade of elephant and its products, including ivory. China joined into CITES in 1981 and completely prohibited the international trade of ivory and its products in 1991, after that, legal ivory material had never been imported into China. As the legal ivory in stock becomes less and less gradually, the ivory industry have to meet the embarrassing fact of "Cook a meal without rice".In 1997, under the precondition that the idea of sustainable development was widely accepted, the 10th CoP of CITES amended the Africa elephant population of Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana into Appendix II, and passed the Resolution of a one-off sale less than 60 tons of Africa ivory stock exporting to Japan tentatively. In April 1999, Japan gained the first ivory stock, 49 576.56kg in total, after the ban. Since then, the 12th CoP of CITES in 2002 and the 14th CoP of CITES in 2007 allowed Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa to export certain amount of row ivory respectively, which is 60 tons in 2002. It brings a dawn to our ivory industry that CITES open access to ivory international trading conditionally. Striving for the limited international legal ivory stock becomes the new hope to inherit and develop our ivory carving art.Chinese government commenced implementing the marking management of ivory in 2000 and adopted the dual marking management system of the ivory and its products on May 1st 2004. Though China are recognized widely by the international society in fulfillment of CITES, but also accused, even pushed to the edge of sanctions because of the fact of the lawless phenomenon such as smuggling on some level. China is also considered as one of the largest terminus of smuggling ivory. These negative phenomenons tampered our reputation, and blocked our course of importing legal ivory material. In this paper, computer and the internet platform were used for collecting information and analysis. At first, cases of smuggling ivory, which were reported by Chinese and international media, were collected. Then, the characters, the time and place of occurrences, the enforcement department, origin places, destinations and the criminals of these cases were analyzed in order to reflect the status of the lawless ivory actions in China based on facts, and provide assured evidence for the international society to recognize the status of China distinctly. Associated with interrelated policies and positions in China and abroad this time, we summarized the rules of these cases and discussed the countermeasures preliminary so that the law enforcement department could strike ivory interrelated crimes such as smuggle more conveniently and improve our level of fulfilling CITES.