Editing CITES (section)

===Drafting===
By design, CITES regulates and monitors trade in the manner of a "[[negative list]]" such that trade in all species is permitted and unregulated ''unless'' the species in question appears on the Appendices or looks very much like one of those taxa. Then and only then, trade is regulated or constrained.  Because the remit of the Convention covers millions of species of plants and animals, and tens of thousands of these taxa are potentially of economic value, in practice this negative list approach effectively forces CITES signatories to expend limited resources on just a select few, leaving many species to be traded with neither constraint nor review.  For example, recently several bird classified as [[IUCN Red List|threatened with extinction]] appeared in the legal wild bird trade because the CITES process never considered their status.  If a "positive list" approach were taken, only species evaluated and approved for the positive list would be permitted in trade, thus lightening the review burden for member states and the Secretariat, and also preventing inadvertent legal trade threats to poorly known species.

Specific weaknesses in the text include: it does not stipulate guidelines for the 'non-detriment' finding required of national Scientific Authorities; non-detriment findings require copious amounts of information; the 'household effects' clause is often not rigid enough/specific enough to prevent CITES violations by means of this Article (VII); non-reporting from Parties means Secretariat monitoring is incomplete; and it has no capacity to address domestic trade in listed species.

In order to ensure that the [[General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]] (GATT) was not violated, the Secretariat of GATT was consulted during the drafting process.<ref name="what_is_cites">{{cite web|url= http://www.cites.org/eng/disc/what.php |title=What is CITES?|work=cites.org|publisher=CITES|access-date=13 February 2012}}</ref>