In international environmental law, the elephant is an icon. Like other “charismatic megafauna” such as whales and pandas, the plight of the elephant has captured the imagination of the general public and generated a raft of international regulations. In efforts to protect the elephant, we can track many of the elements of international law that have been characteristic of the environmental field as a whole: historical beginnings in concerns to prevent the over-exploitation of a harvested species; the rise of notions of biodiversity that attribute intrinsic worth to nonhuman beings; the use of trade measures as part of international environmental agreements to aid enforcement efforts; the growing complexity of environmental problems with globalization; and the increasing inter-linkage of international environmental law with other fields of international law.

The development of rules and institutions relating to protection of elephants demonstrates the cardinal role of issue framing for international law. Frames are lenses that we use to highlight parts of reality and to promote particular policies over others. Over the past few decades, a wide variety of treaties and institutions addressing threats to elephants has developed, reflecting as wide a variety of frames. Some of these have helped elephants more than others.

The two African states Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic have been struck by civil war enmeshed with military involvement of neighbouring states. The ongoing conflicts have been fuelled by the fight over the countries’ natural resources, ranging from diamonds over gold to ivory. Since the end of the 1990s, the UN Security Council and other UN bodies have been dealing with the conflicts in Congo, and have been trying to bring to an end and to sanction the serious violations of human rights and of IHL that have been committed by all sides in those conflicts. The international community’s attempt to come to grips with the so-called “blood diamonds”, inter alia through a multi-stakeholder process and certification scheme is well known. With two resolutions of January 2014, the UN Security Council addresses the destabilizing effects of the illegal exploitation of wildlife.

In Romain Gary’s novel Roots of Heaven, Morel, a French national in despair over the plight of Africa’s elephants, resolves to promote an international convention that will ban all hunting of elephants. The setting is colonial Chad in French Equatorial Africa in 1953, and, evocative of the current crisis, the story relates that thirty thousand elephants had been killed that year alone. The theme of the use of international law to protect the elephant weaves throughout the narrative. Morel is obsessed with gathering signatures to his petition for the new treaty, to counter “the notoriously insufficient laws for the protection of the African fauna.” The key international treaty at that time was the 1933 Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their Natural State. This convention had been adopted at the urging of scientists anxious over the devastation of elephant (and other wildlife) populations, by colonial governments more concerned over the implications for the ivory trade. The convention regulated hunting for trade and for trophies, as well as subsistence hunting, and provided for the conservation of the elephant as part of a management plan for this very lucrative colonial trade. Admittedly, although its primary objective was the steadfast supply of elephants for their tusks, this treaty did stalwartly stand between traders, governments, and consumers on the one hand, and the final demise of elephants on the other.