From seizure to sentence: Weak prosecution leaves tigers vulnerable to trafficking in Southeast Asia: Report

When tiger poachers and traffickers are apprehended in Southeast Asia, they frequently get away without consequences: Fewer than half of arrests and seizures in the cat’s Southeast Asian range countries are backed up by penalties or convictions, according to a recently published report by Canadian conservation think tank the GuArdean Centre for Conservation Research, wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, and WWF International.

This means there’s little deterrent for a lucrative illegal industry that’s driving tigers toward extinction, experts say. Black market trade in their skins, bones, teeth and other body parts is an extremely lucrative business; most are headed to China, the top consumer.

Researchers assessed publicly available records related to 259 tiger-related seizures in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos between 2019 and 2024 — seven of the 10 countries where wild tigers still survive.

Heather Sohl, the tiger trade lead at WWF and a co-author of the report, noted that these cases represent just a fraction of the trade, “only those which were intercepted and reported.” That level of wildlife crime could have a “massive impact” on wild tiger populations, she said.

Based on their findings, the study’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 in the region.

Little deterrent for tiger poachers and traders

The tiger as a species, Panthera tigris, is in peril. And while some scientists question how many subspecies there are, it’s generally agreed there are six. The Bengal, Amur and Indochinese populations are endangered; the Sumatran, Malayan and South China are one step from extinction, critically endangered. (The latter exists today only in captivity.) Three other subspecies went extinct in the 20^th century: the Bali (1950s), Caspian (1970s) and Javan (1980s).

At the turn of the 20^th century, an estimated 100,000 tigers roamed across about 30 countries, from Turkey in the west to Siberia in the east, south through China and mainland Southeast Asia to the equatorial islands of Indonesia. Today, about 4,000 are left, with poaching and habitat loss posing the greatest threats.

Despite global protection under CITES, a treaty regulating international trade in endangered species — as well as legal protections for tigers in each of the seven nations analyzed by the researchers — the recent report found that criminal justice responses to tiger poaching and trafficking varied widely.

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. Indonesia was the exception, providing publicly available information related to 59 cases dating back to 2015.

In general, most of the prosecutions appeared to target low- and mid-level actors: poachers, couriers and small-scale traders. It’s possible that some high-level actors were arrested, but most appeared to act at the local level, according to the researchers.

Experts note that trade in tiger parts is lucrative, and with relatively poor enforcement, it’s a high-reward, low-risk venture, which is why international syndicates are involved.

“We’re talking about serious organized crime,” Sohl said. “These are criminal networks that are involved in other organized crime, such as human trafficking and money laundering.”

Tiger parts have historically been used in traditional Chinese medicine, and while there’s still demand from that side, consumer patterns have shifted over the last dozen years or so.

Pelts have become luxury home furnishings, tiger bone wine and tiger meat are served to flaunt wealth, power, or to seal a business deal, and tiger teeth are fashioned into jewelry, according to a report commissioned by the CITES Secretariat.

“‘Wealth’ [is] replacing ‘health’ as a primary form of consumer motivation,” it noted, with tiger parts “now consumed less as medicine and more as exotic luxury products,” the report said.

Poaching continues to drive tiger declines, and conviction rates show that “the seizures and arrests alone aren’t enough,” Sohl said. “Investigation and case-building is needed to build support for strong prosecutions, and only by looking across the whole criminal justice response can we look to really disrupt these wildlife trafficking networks.”

For Chas Barnes, countertrafficking lead at U.S.-based wildcat conservation nonprofit Panthera, who wasn’t involved in the study, called the new report “timely and significant,” underlining the importance of what happens — or doesn’t — after seizures are made.

“Weak law enforcement or weak punishment undermines other important [conservation] interventions,” Barnes told Mongabay.

Limited transparency, few prosecutions

From 2019-2024, Vietnam and Indonesia led in the numbers of seizures and arrests and together logged 102 convictions that carried penalties or imprisonment; there were 51 such cases in each country during that period. Vietnam also accounted for 33 of the 35 sentences that were suspended.

The high numbers recorded in those two countries may not necessarily reflect the scale of tiger poaching or trafficking in the region. It 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 — and the lack of data from other nations.

“It’s really difficult to develop a clear picture of what’s happening in some of the other countries because there’s just no transparency with regards to prosecutions,” she said.

Cambodia and Laos each had one successfully prosecuted case. Myanmar reported none. Thailand and Malaysia had relatively high numbers of arrests, 36 and 35 respectively, but limited convictions, with five and nine individuals imprisoned respectively.

The average conviction in Indonesia led to a prison sentence of 21 months and 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 that were 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 the full picture. Even in Indonesia “it remains unclear what happens in those instances where prosecution efforts fail,” he wrote.

Strengthening the response

Based on their findings, the report’s authors recommend improving access to publicly available court records and emphasized the need to educate judges and prosecutors on wildlife crime statutes. To provide stronger evidence to support conviction, the authors recommend better officer training and more coordinated investigations that may provide evidence for anticorruption or money-laundering charges, rather than solely relying on wildlife laws to prosecute traffickers.

Boratto said solutions should not just focus on harsher penalties but should adopt methods that have the highest impact on wildlife crime.

“It’s not just about prosecuting and punishing people but thinking about what is going to actually deter crime,” she said.

One recommendation is the use of restorative justice in sentencing to support affected communities and ecosystems, such as by directing money from fines to conservation efforts. “There are alternative approaches and restorative approaches that could be explored in these contexts,” Boratto said.

The authors found that successful prosecutions included coordination between law enforcement and prosecutors, as well as routine use of forensic evidence and information sourced from community members, as well as undercover operations. They also urge the use of forensic, digital, and financial evidence to target wildlife trafficking networks and high-level traffickers.

“The key thing that we felt this report showed was that to have effective enforcement around wildlife trafficking, you need to have a comprehensive criminal justice response,” Sohl said. “Not only from the interception, the seizures and arrests, but leading to the investigations and then to the prosecutions and the sentencing.”

Barnes backed the recommendations and added that an “intelligence-led” approach is needed to address wildlife crime and reach high-level traffickers. “Targeting the low- and medium-level offenders isn’t always the way to go for the maximum disruption.”

Record penalties that were handed out in Malaysia earlier this year to three individuals for possession of more than 1,000 wildlife parts are seen as a sign of progress there. “But it’s important to keep this message going that we’ve got to go for the high-level organizers and the financiers as well,” Barnes said.

Fundamentally, wildlife laws must have teeth behind them, lead author Boratto said: “You can have the best laws in the world, but if they’re not implemented and there isn’t follow-through with the criminal justice response, then they’re essentially just laws on paper” — paper tigers.

Banner image: A Sumatran tiger, captured by a camera trap. This critically endangered subspecies is still under heavy threat from poachers, and though accurate numbers are unknown, fewer than 600 remain. Image by Steve Winter/Big Cat Voices.

Cite this article

Sean Mowbray (2026). From seizure to sentence: Weak prosecution leaves tigers vulnerable to trafficking in Southeast Asia: Report. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-327188