Combating International Crime

The Longer Arm of the Law

Steven David Brown

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134047840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica del derecho

The realities of international law enforcement are widely misunderstood and generally mystifying to the uninitiated. Combating cross border crime is a dynamic aspect of criminal justice that is becoming increasingly complex and directly relevant to national and local level policing. Unfortunately, most practitioners and policy-makers are unaware of the challenges involved in investigating and prosecuting criminals across frontiers. Professional experience of combating international crime is still restricted to relatively few.

Globalization and technological advances have removed a great many obstacles to trade, but they have also facilitated access to new markets for criminal entrepreneurs whilst offering a reduced risk of detection and prosecution. International criminal activity has always had a significant and direct, if somewhat obscured, impact on the national and local crime picture. Without effective or coordinated cross-border strategies to redress the balance, the risk and damage caused by international criminal activity will continue to increase unabated.

Combating International Crime maps the practicalities and challenges in making cross-border law enforcement work. Addressing the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of crime or criminality which is conducted in more than one country, it provides a professional assessment and describes the essential ingredients of international law enforcement cooperation. It identifies the needs, implications and consequences of a comprehensive strategy against international crime and contains case studies by way of illustration and example.

Part I
The context

The longer arm of the law

An introduction

Steven David Brown

Criminals have since time immemorial been cautioned and chastised to beware the ‘long arm of the law’. This is a well-known English expression reflecting the popular view that the reach of law enforcement and justice exceeds its grasp, but more recently felons have come to learn that the reach of criminal justice all too often extends only as far as the nearest national border.

Our world has experienced enormous and unprecedented technological progress in recent years the rate of which shows little sign of slowing down. Unfortunately, along with the undoubted benefits, we are also confronted by a new complexity. Technology has influenced every aspect of our socio-economic existence and threatened the cultural balance established by centuries of development. In terms of the rule of law it has, as in so many other areas of life, presented both new challenges and new opportunities. It has created new crimes (such as phishing, internet child pornography, software piracy and credit-card cloning) and changed the way old crimes are committed (such as the advance fee frauds that now come courtesy of email), but at the same time law enforcement can also call upon new tools, techniques and methodologies that would have been inconceivable before now. Forensic science, for example, has with renewed vigour proved again and again the truth of Locard’s principle of exchange:¹ it has allowed the origins of murder victims to be identified through trace contaminants in their bones, and brought murderers and rapists to justice by their DNA decades after their offences were committed. Communications technology has also come a long way since Crippen² received the unwelcome honour of being the first to be arrested as the result of a radio telegram in 1910. And then there is the development of professional skills to consider. For instance, the role of the card-index collator, once the mainstay of local police knowledge, has evolved out of all recognition into the hi-tech crime analyst (with organisations such as Europol and Interpol concentrating a hefty proportion of staff resources in this area). Unfortunately, improved communications, new technologies and international mobility have also provided criminals with an additional dimension and facility to their activity, helping them to mask their identities, avoid detection and escape justice as well as to hide their proceeds.

National law enforcement has been relatively slow to recognise the need to adjust to this phenomenon. National governments have been even slower. International police co-operation is expensive; it needs to accommodate differences in national policing, strategy and legislation, and depends on some level of surrender of control. In 1998 the G8 group of countries described the situation with some eloquence:

Globalization has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in transnational crime. This takes many forms, including trafficking in drugs and weapons; smuggling of human beings; the abuse of new technologies to steal, defraud and evade the law; and the laundering of the proceeds of crime.

Such crimes pose a threat not only to our own citizens and their communities, through lives blighted by drugs and societies living in fear of organised crime; but also a global threat which can undermine the democratic and economic basis of societies through the investment of illegal money by international cartels, corruption, a weakening of institutions and a loss of confidence in the rule of law.

To fight this threat, international co-operation is indispensable … There must be no safe havens either for criminals or for their money.³

Political choices have to be made at the national level on how best to deal with international crime, but the menu of options is limited:

• reinforce national borders;

• reduce demand for contraband based crime;

• send personnel to foreign jurisdictions to liaise locally (or advise) on matters of national law enforcement interest;

• negotiate and support common international standards;

• provide aid to source and transit countries in order to enhance their law enforcement capacities (either directly or through an international proxy);

• influence governments in source and transit countries to commit their own resources to interdict crime locally;

• participate in international organisations which can then act as a central co-ordinating authority;

• build a non-centralised co-operative network with other countries to pool resources and manage information.

There is a further, controversial, option which has been judiciously avoided: the creation of a supranational investigative body with executive powers (i.e. a true international police force). Given the loss of political control (and accountability) represented by accepting a ‘higher level’ police authority, it is hardly surprising that a supranational police force has, to date, not found favour. Certain international groupings have attempted to approximate this concept: the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have set up investigative departments with powers based on treaty and dedicated to offences with a specific significance; the European Union has the Office Lutte Anti-fraud (OLAF—the anti-fraud office)⁴ for investigating irregularities involving the EU budget; and the UN has the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS)⁵ which travels the world investigating contraventions against its charter involving UN personnel. However, when it comes to the use of coercive powers and criminal prosecution, each of these agencies must have recourse to the local authorities.

IS CROSS-BORDER LAW ENFORCEMENT NEEDED?

The extent to which the international dimension affects the national crime picture has been disputed:

The shallow nature of the arguments for further improvements in the quality of police co-operation … creating fantasies and fears about potential threats to internal security concerning a flood of illegal immigrants bringing with them drugs, arms dealing, organised crime and racketeers, may have a certain populist appeal, but it is not an adequate substitute for ethical arguments on which to base new obligations.⁶

However, such arguments inadequately appreciate the interactivity of the global criminal economy:⁷

• heroin sold on the streets of western Europe is cultivated in Afghanistan;

• cocaine snorted in Milan is grown in Colombia;

• seven per cent of world trade is in counterfeit products, two-thirds of which are manufactured in China;⁸

• dirty money is laundered through the world’s financial markets in New York, London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Tokyo;

• pills popped in the night clubs of Sydney were probably made in the Netherlands;

• a credit card scanned surreptitiously behind a bar in Cape Town can be cloned within 24 hours and used to purchase luxury items in Manhattan;

• the mobile phone slipped from the coat pocket on the Metro in Paris may be reprogrammed and sold on a market stall in East Africa;

• a luxury car may be stolen from the streets of Spain and sold in the Balkans;

• paedophiles travel to the developing world on sex tours or sit at home and log on to websites with servers located in distant lands.

Each of these offences would normally be viewed in terms of a national crime statistic, but they all have an international dimension, and, increasingly, the serious crime business model involves setting up in one jurisdiction, but operating in another. Without the close and constructive collaboration of national law enforcement bodies both investigations and prosecutions in such cases would be forlorn and impotent gestures.

There is an argument to say that international crime should not be viewed as a separate category. After all, the actual illegal acts committed by criminals across borders are generally the same as those committed nationally (except, of course, where importation is a key element of the offence). However, anecdotal evidence of an increase in cross-border criminal activity supports the view that the phenomenon of international crime deserves closer scrutiny.

International crime may be characterised differently not so much because of the type of act involved (acquisitive, violent, sexual, etc.), but because of the environment in which it is committed and the additional challenges entailed in its prevention, detection and prosecution. For example, it would have been impossible for investigators dealing with the gangland execution of six Italians in August 2007 in Duisburg, Germany, to do so without close reference to the authorities in Calabria. And, at the same time, law enforcement in Italy needed to pay due regard to the local consequences of those distant killings. Calabrian crime groups (the ‘Ndrangheta) are reported to have been buying into Germany for 20 years, to have property on five continents and investments in the Frankfurt stock exchange.⁹ Clearly this phenomenon cannot be seriously viewed as a purely national threat.

International trade differs from national trade only because of the economic complexities involved in labour markets, raw material costs, international freight, the movement of funds between international financial markets and by its regulation. By analogy international crime has a similar relationship to national crime. The interactions exhibit the same complexity and, in the same way that international trade influences the costs on the high street, much internationally committed crime can be said to influence the quality of life in the local neighbourhood. For example, the virulent attentions of narcoconglomerates from Latin America threaten to overwhelm the legitimate community in tiny Guinea-Bissau in West Africa which finds itself on the front line of international drug trafficking, but without the wherewithal to fight back. Clearly Guinea-Bissau is not the destination for the drugs, just a bridgehead and vantage point for onward delivery.¹⁰

If the existence of international crime as a separate phenomenon can be accepted, then, of course, it follows that there is also a need for some degree of international response. Whether this can be accomplished solely at the national level has yet to be evidenced. So far, existing strategi...

Table of contents

• Contents
• The authors
• Foreword
• Editor’s note
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The context
• Part II Co-operation
• Part III The mechanics of communication
• Part IV Major tools and techniques
• Part V In practice
• Appendices
• Index