The Enforcement Gap
Why the trade continues — structural failures in law and prosecution
Near-Impunity: A System Operating as Designed
The illegal leopard trade persists not because it is invisible. Enforcement agencies in India, Nepal, and range states across Africa and Southeast Asia conduct raids, make arrests, and seize contraband with regularity. The seizure record is extensive, the case files are thick, and the names of key traffickers are known to investigators across multiple jurisdictions. The trade persists because the downstream consequences of arrest are structurally insufficient to disrupt the networks that sustain it.
This is not a failure of individual officers or prosecutors. It is a system that has not — at any level that matters — decided that the leopard’s life is worth protecting with the same seriousness it protects other things. The enforcement gap is not a gap in knowledge. It is a gap in will, resources, and political prioritisation that the leopard’s neglected status makes chronic.
The Bail Problem — Lodu Dime
The case of Lodu Dime has become, for those who work in big cat conservation, the single most cited illustration of judicial failure in wildlife trafficking. Dime — a Kathmandu-based trafficker whose name appeared across every major seizure in the India-Nepal-Tibet corridor for years — was convicted in absentia by Patan High Court in 2015. Sentenced to five years. Fined Rs 100,000. He had already fled to India and continued operating.
In January 2018 an INTERPOL Red Notice was secured. He was detected at New Delhi airport within six weeks. Arrested at Kathmandu airport in March 2018 — a joint operation between Nepal Police, Indian authorities, and INTERPOL that represented exactly the kind of coordinated international enforcement the trade requires.
In July 2018, Nepal’s Supreme Court granted bail. The amount: Rs 45,000. Approximately USD 350. No travel ban was imposed. Within weeks, Dime had absconded. He is believed to be operating from Indian territory.
The vehicle owner who transported the contraband that triggered the original 2013 investigation served the full nine years of his sentence while Dime — the network coordinator, the buyer, the organiser — walked free on USD 350.
This is not an outlier. It is a pattern documented across multiple high-profile cases in Nepal, India, and Africa. The Dime case is cited here not because it is exceptional but because it is representative — a precise illustration of how bail conditions that bear no relationship to the economic value of wildlife crime make absconding the rational choice for any trafficker with means.
Minimum Sentencing Despite Maximum Provisions
Nepal’s National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act provides for sentences of up to 15 years for major wildlife trafficking offences. No trafficker has ever received this maximum sentence. The gap between what the law provides and what courts deliver is not a matter of insufficient evidence — it is a matter of judicial culture, political influence, and an institutional failure to treat wildlife crime with the seriousness its scale demands.
Ramjas Banjara — arrested in Nepal in 2015 with tiger hide and 47 tiger bones — received five years, the minimum. Prosecutors had specifically requested the maximum. The court declined. Banjara confessed that he had purchased the tiger hide for Rs 15,000 — approximately USD 128. He was released after serving his sentence.
The pattern is replicated across range states. A 2021 investigation by Oxpeckers found that Nepal’s courts consistently applied minimum sentences in wildlife crime cases, with multiple conservationists and judicial observers pointing to the same structural factors: judicial unfamiliarity with wildlife crime, political patronage relationships protecting upper-tier traffickers, poor prosecution preparation, and a cultural framework in which killing animals — even endangered ones — is not perceived as equivalent in moral weight to crimes against people.
As one Chief Conservation Officer from Chitwan National Park put it: “Some judges think killing a baby buffalo and a one-horned rhino involve similar offences. They are of the view that they should not send anyone to jail for simply killing an animal.”
Corruption — The Insider Dimension
In March 2026, a deputy forest ranger was among those arrested in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, for involvement in the killing of tigers and leopards — the meat consumed, the parts sold. In Odisha, a protection staff member and witness to elephant poaching died under suspicious circumstances that were never fully investigated. In Karnataka, Operation Clawing Back found leopard claw jewellery being sold openly in markets — goods that required a supply chain operating through, or at least alongside, the wildlife protection infrastructure.
Insider corruption is not peripheral to the leopard trafficking problem. It is structural. When 40% of forest guard posts and 58% of ranger posts are vacant in Odisha — one of India’s primary leopard trafficking hotspots — the enforcement gap is not only judicial. It is physical. The forests are not being patrolled because there is no one to patrol them. And where there are officers, the networks have demonstrated a consistent capacity to neutralise, compromise, or circumvent them.
26 Years — The Lucknow Precedent
In March 2000, CBI investigators raided residences in Lucknow and recovered 18,000 leopard claws, 74 leopard skins, four tiger skins, and associated bones. By the standard forensic calculation, the 18,000 claws represent approximately 1,000 individual leopards. The CBI filed a charge sheet by July 2000.
On 30 March 2026 — 26 years after the case was registered — a CBI court in Lucknow convicted six individuals: Mumtaj Ahmad, Jaibun Nisha, Ajij Ullah, Waheed, Sartaj, and Majeed. Each received two years’ imprisonment and a fine of Rs 10,000 — approximately USD 120.
The CBI stated that the conviction “highlights its continued efforts to combat wildlife crime” and that “the verdict is expected to serve as a deterrent.”
Twenty-six years. USD 120. One thousand leopards.
The deterrent argument is not available when the consequence of a crime arrives a quarter of a century after the crime itself. In those 26 years, the networks that supplied that Lucknow cache continued to operate. They adapted. They are documented — in the seizure records of Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Nepal — through to the present month. The six people convicted in March 2026 had been living with the knowledge of that case for 26 years. Whatever deterrent the verdict provides, it did not prevent anything that happened in the intervening period.
The Africa Dimension — Prosecution Failure at Scale
The enforcement gap is not specific to South Asia. Between 2010 and 2021, Nigerian authorities intercepted 63 illegal wildlife shipments. Only 11 led to court cases. None resulted in jail time.
Namibia’s 2020 Wildlife Crime Report found that only 54% of suspects arrested in 2015 had their cases resolved five years later. Mongabay’s investigators, reviewing the African enforcement record across multiple countries, used the term “systematic failure” — not to describe individual cases but to characterise the structural relationship between wildlife crime and its legal consequences across the continent.
The EAGLE Network documents approximately 30 leopard skin seizures annually across West, Central, and East Africa. Its founder Ofir Drori has stated plainly that this figure represents a fraction of actual trade, and that he sees an increase year on year. The open market survey in Côte d’Ivoire in 2025 — finding leopard parts for sale in nearly half of 46 markets surveyed — confirms what the seizure data implies: enforcement is not keeping pace with the trade.
The CITES Data Gap — Acknowledged
In a report following the 2023 meeting of its standing committee, CITES noted a lack of specific information concerning seizure data related to illegal trade in Asian leopards, as its database groups all leopards together regardless of subspecies or region. It suggested that member countries submit ad hoc reports on the illegal trade in their jurisdictions before the next standing committee meeting.
This is CITES — the international body whose Appendix I listing provides the leopard’s highest level of legal protection — acknowledging that it cannot properly track the trade it is mandated to regulate. The listing is real. The data infrastructure to enforce it is not.
The leopard has had the full protection of international law since 1975. Fifty years of Appendix I listing have not produced a comprehensive, publicly accessible, disaggregated seizure database. The diplomatic attention, dedicated funding streams, and Species Survival Commission resources that flow to tiger, elephant, and rhino do not flow comparably to leopard. The listing is the floor of what is required. It has been treated as the ceiling.
What Effective Enforcement Looks Like
The arrest of Yangchen Lachungpa in December 2025 — after a ten-year hunt, a CBI-secured INTERPOL Red Notice, and a joint operation involving Madhya Pradesh’s State Tiger Strike Force, the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, and Sikkim Police — demonstrates what is possible when institutional will aligns with resources and coordination.
The operation succeeded because it treated wildlife crime as serious organised crime: sustained intelligence work over years, cross-agency and cross-border coordination, use of international enforcement tools, and a willingness to pursue a target through a decade of evasion. Lachungpa was caught because the system, in that instance, functioned as it was designed to.
This approach remains the exception. The Lachungpa arrest is notable precisely because it is rare. The Dime pattern — arrest, bail, abscond — is notable because it is not.
The Leopard Among Neglected Species
The enforcement gap for leopards reflects a wider paradigm in wildlife conservation law. Resources, political will, and international attention cluster around a small number of iconic species while the broader spectrum of threatened wildlife operates in a zone of relative impunity. The leopard’s ubiquity is, paradoxically, a disadvantage. It seems less urgent than the tiger precisely because it is everywhere.
The data tells a different story. The leopard is Asia’s most trafficked big cat. It is traded across more countries, in more product forms, through more networks, and with less enforcement consequence than any other large felid on earth. The enforcement gap is not a gap in the law. It is a gap in the decision to enforce it.
Closing that gap requires treating leopard trafficking as tier-one organised crime — with the investigative resources, prosecution targets, judicial training, bail reform, and international coordination that designation implies. Until that decision is made, at a level of political seriousness that matches the scale of the crime, the gap will remain. And leopards will continue to fill it.
Blood of the Leopard is a living document published by WildTiger /Mission Leopard .
wildleopard.net · wildtiger.org