17th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP17) of the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)

The seventeenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP17) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) opens in Johannesburg, South Africa on Saturday, 24 September 2016 and will continue through Wednesday, 5 October 2016.

During CoP17, participants will consider many documents, including on: actions to combat wildlife trafficking; demand reduction strategies to combat illegal trade in CITES-listed species; provisions on international trade in hunting trophies of species listed in Appendix I or II aimed at enabling better controls of the sustainable and legal origin of those specimens; illegal trade in cheetahs; elephants and trade in ivory; agarwood-producing taxa; and ebonies.

Several proposals concern transfer of species from Appendix II to Appendix I, including the proposal to transfer the African grey parrot, African lion, Indian pangolin, Philippines pangolin, Sunda pangolin, Chinese pangolin and four African species of pangolins. A number of other species are proposed for listing in Appendix II or transfer from Appendix I to Appendix II, like the Peregrine falcon. There is also a proposal to alter the existing annotation on the Appendix II listing of Swaziland’ss white rhino, so as to permit a limited and regulated trade in white rhino horn which has been collected in the past from natural deaths, or recovered from poached Swazi rhino, as well as horn to be harvested in a non-lethal way from a limited number of white rhino in the future in Swaziland.

This will be the fourth meeting of the CITES CoP held on the African continent since CITES came into force on 1 July 1975, but it will the first held on the continent since 2000.