The Illicit Ivory Trade and Joseph Kony: An Inside Look at Wildlife Trafficking

Oct 27, 2015 | Enough Project
Washington, DC
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RSVP to attend: Invited Special Guests:
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce and Ranking Member Eliot Engel Panelists: 
Kathryn Bigelow, Sasha Lezhnev, Jackson Miller, Ledio Cakaj 

Various rebel groups and criminal organizations are involved in wildlife trafficking globally. Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a U.S.-designated terrorist group that has abducted over 66,000 youth for use as child soldiers, servants, and sex slaves, has been actively engaged in elephant poaching and ivory trafficking in order to sustain its operations.

Kony’s fighters are part of an onslaught of elephant poaching by an array of armed groups and poachers, including from Sudan and South Sudan, which has left rangers in national parks besieged, under resourced, and often out-matched. The elephant population in Congo’s Garamba National Park has already been decimated from 20,000 in the 1980s to approximately 1,000 today, and it could be wiped out entirely.

This panel will present findings from recent field research in central Africa on the LRA’s ivory trafficking, its internal power dynamics, and the need for additional U.S. policy tools to combat the illicit trade.

In May 2015, Representatives Ed Royce and Eliot Engel introduced H.R. 2494, the Global Anti-Poaching Act. Please join us for a collaborative discussion on the connection between wildlife trafficking and human rights, and the positive impact that consumers and the U.S. Government, particularly Congress, can have.