This ?rhino court? had 100 percent poacher convictions. Why was it closed?

The spoor is fresh!” Sandra Snelling, an operations manager for South African National Parks (SANParks), exclaimed, sending a squad of rangers on their next mission: tracking the poachers who had just killed a rhino in Kruger National Park.It was October 2016, and I’d come to Skukuza, a SANparks post inside Kruger, to see how anti-poaching operations are carried out in the famed 7,500-square-mile preserve, where about 30 percent of the world’s estimated remaining 18,000 wild rhinos live.Urgent dispatches are no surprise to these rangers, members of a special operations unit. Poachers have killed more than 8,200 rhinos in South Africa during the past decade; from 2012 to 2017, Kruger’s white rhino numbers fell from 10,500 to about 5,100.In recent years, it seems, the anti-poaching battleground has expanded, as criminal networks appear to be infiltrating South Africa’s judicial and bureaucratic structures.“It is difficult to convey the scale of the problem,” says Andrea Crosta, executive director of Earth League International, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit dedicated to fighting wildlife crime. In addition, wildlife advocates also point to the failure of the South African Police Service to renew a contract for DNA testing of rhino horn evidence, among other government inactions.Questions therefore arise among field personnel, investigators, prosecutors, lawyers and conservation organizations as to whether various individuals are making concerted efforts to undermine law enforcement and increase the chances for poaching suspects to walk free.Confronting the crime syndicates that finance and organize rhino killings is key to combating the relentless onslaught, Jooste said in a 2016 Global Initiative investigation into transnational organized crime and rhino horn trafficking. Meanwhile, rhino killings in parks in other provinces, such as KwaZulu-Natal and North West, increased, suggesting that poachers had begun to avoid Kruger.“The higher the sentence, the bigger the deterrent,” Venter told me in May 2018 when I visited her in her Skukuza courthouse office, a stark room lined with hundreds of case files.These white rhinos crossed from Kruger into Mozambique’s Sabie Game Reserve, alongside South Africa’s eastern border. During the past decade, poachers have killed more than 8,200 rhinos in South Africa, almost 5,000 of them in Kruger; rhinos straying into Sabie stand almost no chance of surviving.Despite Skukuza Regional Court’s rapid and dramatic success, on August 28, 2019, Naomi Engelbrecht, who administers regional and district courts in Mpumalanga province, ordered the court’s entire roll of some 72 cases transferred to Mhala Regional Court, more than 50 miles away.Engelbrecht’s action took her boss, judge president of Mpumalanga province Francis Legodi, by surprise. Instead, Kgama Shai, a criminal defense attorney representing suspected poachers who would appear before the court, spoke on her behalf.“Her being spoken for by Shai really led people to question her motives and integrity,” says Elise Serfontein, founding director of StopRhinoPoaching.com, an independent South African nonprofit.In a ruling on April 22, Mpumalanga High Court declared Engelbrecht’s reasons for closing the court invalid and said she’d “acted improperly” in defying Legodi’s orders and serving as magistrate to stop the re-transfer of cases back to Skukuza.In their written ruling, the justices also noted concerns that Engelbrecht may have “stopped the regional court from sitting at Skukuza as a result of request by the [accused poachers’] attorneys.”“Her conduct had actual and potential harmful consequences,” the high court concluded. “So they try to delay.”According to Venter, she and her prosecutor colleague typically finalized four to eight cases a month, whereas at Mhala court, only two of their rhino poaching-related cases were concluded between September 2019 and the end of February 2020.“That slow justice sends a message to rangers that these crimes are not a priority,” Ellis says.Environmental investigators with South African National Parks collect tissue and other samples from a dead rhino, providing DNA evidence that can be used to connect suspected poachers to the carcass. “The tender hasn’t gone out to my knowledge, and no analysis has been done except in some very urgent cases,” says Cindy Harper, the lab’s director.South African Police Services spokesperson Brigadier Vish Naidoo told National Geographic that he couldn’t comment to avoid “divulging critical information that has significant bearing on our investigation processes.”Serfontein says that this non-renewal, along with the closure of Skukuza Regional Court and the sidelining of effective personnel, suggests a pattern of corruption that’s eroding law enforcement.