CITES 2010: Fifteenth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties
Fuente: www.cites.org
The 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP15) is going to be held in Doha (Qatar) from March 13th to 25th, 2010.
Once again, the Parties to CITES will meet in 2010. For CITES, a State is called Party or Member when the Convention enters into force for that country, for which it must adhere to the treaty. CITES currently has 175 Parties
It is an international treaty between governments drawn up as a result of the resolution adopted in 1963 at a meeting of the members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), whose text was finally approved in 1975 and came into force two years later. Its purpose is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. The agreement contemplates these species through their inclusion in three appendices, which have different degrees of protection (http://www.cites.org/esp/app/index.html). CITES entered into force in 1975.
CITES is one of the largest existing international agreements and deals with the protection of species through the control of their trade. Although CITES is legally binding for each of its Parties, it does not replace each country’s domestic laws. However, it gives guidelines that must be respected by each Party which has to adapt its domestic laws to ensure that CITES will be enforced at national level.
CITES functions controlling international trade in specimens of certain species. This requires that all imports, exports, re-exports and introductions from the sea of species abide by the Convention, must be authorized through a permit system.
Each of the Parties to the Convention must assign one or more Delegates to be present at CITES meetings, being the Conference of the Parties the largest one, where all members meet to conduct the discussions and the approval -or not- of various proposals for the inclusion or exclusion of species in the different Appendices, the approval of decisions and resolutions that deal with the implementation of the agreement, changes in protocols, etc..
During this meeting, no proposal for amendment of appendix that contemplates dolphins and whales are going to be introduced, so modifications to the current scheme of protection that exists on cetaceans within the Convention are not expected, but there are decisions regarding other issues, such as the introduction from the sea, or the rulings of non-detrimental extractions, and it will be important to pay attention to these issues because they are closely related to cetaceans.
For more information about CITES: