Since the establishment of a court in Mlele District, the project team can better monitor cases at police and court level. Three poachers who shot a giraffe, a fully protected species, were arrested by village game scouts, handed over to the police and convicted.
Arresting offenders is of little use if the illegal activities are not subsequently sanctioned by a court which was the case during the first years of the project. Thanks to the adoption of stricter legal sanctions for this type of offence, and through better application of the law in the courts the situation has clearly improved over the last three years, when the current president came to power at the end of 2015.
Since the establishment of a court in Mlele District, the project team can better monitor cases at police and court level. At the end of December 2016, village game scouts managed to arrest three poachers who had killed a giraffe, a fully protected species. They were then handed over to the police, and legal proceedings were opened against them. The village game scouts were brought to testify before the court of justice during this procedure. This trial aroused a great deal of interest as many jurists from the region came to attend. Under the new law, the Inyonga District Court sentenced the three poachers to 20 years in prison for a major economic crime.