Vietnam's Weak Prosecution Undermines Tiger Trafficking Fight: Report

In Southeast Asia, nearly half of tiger poaching and trafficking arrests and seizures are not resulting in penalties or convictions, according to a new report by Canadian conservation think tank the GuArdean Centre for Conservation Research, wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, and WWF International. This means there is little deterrent for a lucrative illegal industry that is driving tigers toward extinction, experts say. The black market trade in their skins, bones, teeth, and other body parts is an extremely lucrative business, with most of it headed to China, the top consumer. Researchers assessed publicly available records related to 259 tiger-related seizures in seven of the 10 countries where wild tigers still survive — Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos — between 2019 and 2024. Heather Sohl, the tiger trade lead at WWF, noted that these cases represent just a fraction of the trade, “only those which were intercepted and reported,” and that this level of wildlife crime could have a “massive impact” on wild tiger populations. The report's authors are calling for a raft of measures to strengthen sentencing in an effort to fight the international criminal organizations that mastermind tiger trade and other wildlife crime. Tigers are critically endangered, with populations having dwindled from an estimated 100,000 at the turn of the 20th century to about 4,000 today. Of the 259 cases they examined, 110 (42%) resulted in jail time or fines. In 35 cases (14%), convicted poachers and traffickers were given suspended sentences. Some 63 arrests didn’t have a clear outcome, while another 48 had no available data. This dearth of data was a running theme for the researchers. Vietnam and Indonesia led in the numbers of seizures and arrests, logging 51 convictions that carried penalties or imprisonment in each country between 2019 and 2024. Vietnam also accounted for 33 of the 35 suspended sentences. The high numbers recorded in those two countries may not necessarily reflect the scale of tiger poaching or trafficking in the region but could be explained, at least partially, by the availability of data in Vietnam and Indonesia, said Rachel Boratto, who led the research and serves as executive director at the nonprofit GuArdean Centre for Conservation Research. On average, convictions in Indonesia led to a prison sentence of 21 months and a fine of $3,867. In Vietnam, the average jail time was 33 months, but the country recorded no fines. Malaysia’s five cases imposed average prison sentences of 60 months and fines of $60,000. In one case in Cambodia, two Vietnamese nationals arrested in 2019 with a cache of tiger bones were sentenced to two years in jail and fined $10,000, which the report called “a relatively substantial penalty.” For Vincent Nijman, a wildlife trade researcher and director of U.K.-based EcoVerde Global Consulting, who wasn’t involved in the study, the report offers an excellent overview of illegal tiger trade, though he noted limitations. “The rate of successful prosecution, while high compared to other protected wildlife, remains rather low,” he wrote in an email. He agreed that limited data posed a “major barrier” to understanding. Experts highlight that tiger trafficking has become a "high reward, low risk" venture, emphasizing that stronger law enforcement and effective sentencing are crucial to protecting the critically endangered tigers.