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International Environmental Crimes and Butterflies

The concept of an international crime is defined in Article 19 of the Draft Articles on International Responsibility, developed by the International Law Commission. It is an international legal act that arises from the breach by a State of an international obligation that is so fundamental to ensuring the vital interests of the international community that its breach is considered a crime against the international community as a whole.

According to international environmental law, international environmental crimes may in particular result from a grave breach of an international obligation that is fundamental to the protection of the environment, such as an obligation prohibiting mass pollution of the atmosphere or seas or mass destruction of flora or fauna (ecocide).

Different legal systems criminalize different acts and provide for different penalties for them. Be that as it may, a significant number of acts fall under international conventions, without which it would be almost impossible to administer justice with any result in international affairs. These conventions reflect the shared understanding among states that certain acts should be regulated, prohibited or criminalized.

According to the UN classification, all transnational crimes are divided into 17 groups, including terrorism, money laundering, human trafficking, the environmental crime.

The decisions of the IX UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders indicate that environmental crimes, which are acquiring a transnational character, are one of the most dangerous crimes among other crimes, and therefore criminal law is called upon to play an important role in the implementation by the international community of its functions to protect the environment.

The conventions that require the application of criminal sanctions for environmental offenses include: the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal; The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which obliges signatory states to control trade in rare and endangered species of animals and plants, and Regulation 338/97 issued on its basis introduces even stricter requirements for the legislation of EU member states; the Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships; the Bamako Convention on the Prohibition of the Import into Africa of Hazardous Wastes and the Control of their Transboundary Movement and Management within Africa, adopted by the Organization of African Unity.

Environmental crimes are one of the most profitable and fastest-growing areas of international criminal activity. The relevance of the problem of international environmental crimes has led to a sharp increase in the number of multilateral agreements, national laws, and regulations aimed at protecting against pollution that is dangerous to human health and the environment, preventing the barbaric exploitation of rare natural resources and protecting endangered animals and plants.

Local and international criminal groups earn $22—31 billion annually from hazardous waste disposal, smuggling of prohibited toxic materials, and exploitation and sale of protected natural resources.

According to the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), illegal trade in endangered species is a lucrative business. The global trade in flora and fauna is estimated to be worth between 10 and 20 billion euros and involves tens of millions of animals and plants per year. Most of this trade is illegal. According to experts, the profit from illegal trade in wild flora and fauna is between 500 and 1000%.

Criminal animal trade is the second most profitable after drug and arms trafficking, and the number of rare animals smuggled across borders is steadily growing every year – in Russia alone, the number of detained batches of such goods almost doubled from 2004 to 2006, numbering in the hundreds.

The main suppliers to the illegal market of «live goods», rare plants, and their parts are:

• Africa and South America – exotic birds and animals (parrots, monkeys);

• Southeast Asia – reptiles, amphibians, amphibians (turtles, snakes, lizards, etc.);

• Europe – collections of insects.

In this regard, the CITES Secretariat welcomed the adoption by the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) of a historic resolution aimed at strengthening the fight against environmental crimes.

The resolution was adopted at the 79th General Assembly of Interpol, which was held in Qatar in November 2010, and was attended by 650 delegates from 141 countries. The resolution calls on national law enforcement agencies to recognize that environmental crimes know no borders and are usually committed by members of organized crime groups involved in other crimes such as murder, corruption, fraud and theft.

Over the past few years, customs authorities have recorded more than 9,800 cases of CITES violations, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. In addition, there is growing evidence that organized crime groups are involved in this dirty business. The international community is now more determined than ever to combat these types of illegal trade.

I will touch upon only a few examples of environmental crimes regarding Parnassians in this part of my book, but I will not specifically focus on them. I will give them mixed with ordinary human crimes (theft, murder, fraud).

You will have to draw your conclusions.

Theft of the Century

In 1911 officer A.K. Golbeck brought to St. Petersburg a butterfly he had received in the Pamirs from a shepherd who had caught it, according to his own words, on the Gushkon Pass of Darvaz Mountain Range. A.K. Golbeck gave to the Chamberlain of the Royal Family, A.V. Avinov, a well-known researcher of Lepidoptera and at that time an assistant to Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich in his entomological affairs. A.V. Avinov was not able to describe this butterfly with very unusual habitus with surprisingly large orange spots on the hind wings as a separate species based on only one specimen, he classified it as a subspecies of the slightly similar species Koramius charltonius (Gray, 1851); he gave the subspecies the name autocrator – «autocrat» in honor of Russian Tsar.

Koramius autocrator (Avinov, 1913), holotype. In the zoological nomenclature such specimen also called a «name bearing specimen». Exactly this one is an object of this criminal story.

East Pamirs, on the shores of Karakul Lake. In the mountains we can see in front of us, Koramius autocrator (Avinov, 1913) is present.

The color photograph of the butterfly presented by A.V. Avinov in the original description caused great excitement among collectors, of whom there were quite a few at the time. A special caste of collectors are collectors of swallowtails. And among them, collectors of Parnassiinae stand out – the most difficult butterflies to collect, since many of the species live in hard-to-reach places. Even now, with modern transportation, and a large development of the road network, the task of catching some representatives of this subfamily (including, by the way, the autocrator