Mandate, Mission & Objectives
The mission of the Task Force is to promote law-enforcement institutional collaboration and effective cross-border control of illegal wildlife trade through shared information and intelligence, joint operations and prosecutions, and public awareness.
The Task Force pursues six objectives:
- Strategic cooperation, building lasting strategic cooperation among the institutions responsible for combating wildlife and forest crime;
- Operational links, establishing practical operational links among member institutions so cases move seamlessly from detection to prosecution;
- Intelligence sharing, enabling the timely sharing of information and intelligence on wildlife crime networks;
- Joint operations and prosecutions, coordinating joint enforcement operations and supporting effective prosecution of offenders;
- Public awareness, raising public awareness of wildlife and forest crime, its costs, and how to report it;
- Regional and global networks, connecting Uganda's response to regional and international enforcement networks, including Interpol, the Lusaka Agreement Task Force and CITES structures.
In practice this means one thing: when wildlife crime occurs anywhere in Uganda, whether a snare line in a national park, a container of scales at the airport or a chainsaw crew in a forest reserve, the full weight of the twelve (12) member law-enforcement agencies can be brought to bear on it through a single coordination mechanism.