Summary of the 4th CITES Working Group Meeting
15 November 2005, Banja Vrujci, Serbia

Update on the membership of the WG

Actual members:

o Birds of Prey Protection Society (Bulgaria) - represented on the meeting by Tamara Lazarova

o BROZ (Slovakia) - represented on the meeting by Katarina Mladenkova

o Green Balkans (Bulgaria) - not represented

o Green Action (Croatia) - represented on the meeting - Petra Djuric

o Milvus Group - Association for Bird and Nature Protection (Romania) - represented on the meeting by Marton A. Kelemen

o Nimfea (Hungary) - not represented

o ORCA - Organization for Respect and Care for Animals (Serbia and Montenegro) - represented on the meeting by Martin Raspor

o Salamandra (Poland) - represented on the meeting by Andrzej Kepel

o Unesco Pro Natura (Romania) - not represented

o Young Researchers of Serbia (Serbia and Montenegro) - represented on the meeting by Jelena Beronja and Ivana Lepoev

WG members agreed that during the implementation of the CeeTES project regular WG meetings are essential for achieving the best possible results. The next WG meeting will be held in Croatia in the end of January/first week of February.

Further WG meetings should be organized as side events of other meetings. Such already identified possibilities are the SSN mini summit in Budapest/Hungary next spring and the potential study trip for the WG members in Denmark, proposed by IFAW.

"Bird Ban Coalition" - an informal coalition to fight for the total import ban, of wild birds to the EU. Its main members are: IFAW, SSN, World Parrot Trust, Born Free Foundation, RSPCA, etc. The coalition has no legal background, joining is free. Decision was taken to join the coalition. The WG members will carry out basic lobby work for the coalition (translating lobby short documents and forwarding them to the relevant decision makers) however more serious involvement of the WG members will require external funding as nor the members nor the WG has the necessary resources for further involvement.

The WG agreed that the 2006 December number (instead of the already planed June 2006 number) of the Diversity magazine should be dedicated to wildlife trade issues. In this number the partial results of the CeeTES project can be already presented.

If the EU core funding for the Ceeweb will be granted, the WG will have its own share. We organized a general brainstorming on what activities we should undertake in the mid term future and than prioritized a few to be financed trough the potential core funding.
Potential further activities were identified (considering that the already planed activities for 2006 will be all implemented).

CeeTES project update and fine tuning of the methodologies

During the first monitoring period quite a few problems or gaps were identified in the methodologies.

The decision was taken that we will not deal with the methodology for the baseline documentation, as its developer (Green Balkans) was not represented on the WG meeting. The proposed modifications will be discussed on the next WG meeting in Croatia in the presence of the Green Balkans representatives.

Both the e-Trade monitoring and the retail commerce monitoring methodology was discussed in details, its developers will present the updated versions of the methodologies till the end of November 2005.