(L) HOUGH, Peter. Crime and Security

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16 Crime and security Peter Hough

Box 16.1: Cocaine and security Colombia’s cocaine industry illustrates the multi-dimensional links between crime and security. The national security of Colombia and the Human Security of its citizens have long been inextricably linked to the production and trade of the notorious narcotic, owing to the power of criminal syndicates who have fought, corrupted and killed in order to control this commerce and the fact that both sides in a long and brutal civil war have also utilised it in order to fund their insurgencies. The security ramifications of Colombian cocaine extend well beyond its borders, though. The lucrative cocaine trade has implications for the national security of Mexico and other parts of Central America and the Human Security of the people who live there as the corruption of state officials and internecine wars between gangs seeking to escort the cargoes periodically spiral out of control. The security dimension of cocaine then also extends to the destinations of this trade in North America, Europe and beyond, where the illegal sale and consumption of the drug claims and undermines thousands of lives to addiction and the criminality that sustains the industry. The ‘securitisation’ of cocaine in international political affairs is classically illustrated by the deployment of US and UK troops sent to assist the Colombian government in their war against drug barons and ‘narco-terrorists’. What is also clear, though, is that such traditional national security measures have not succeeded in stifling the cocaine industry, such are its international tentacles. In a telling illustration of the complexities of securing people and countries against crime, the Colombian government, at the same time as hosting British and American troops, has despatched government ministers and diplomats to London and Washington to call upon those governments to do more to stop their citizens taking cocaine, recognising that this is the root cause of their and the world’s problem with the addictive white powder.

Introduction: the globalisation of crime The complexities and paradoxes that globalisation brings are very apparent when examining the case of international crime. The political and economic coming together of the world over the past quarter of a century may have enhanced personal and national security in many ways, but it has also served to heighten some forms of insecurity, and international crime is notable among these. Crime has always been a Human Security concern and the maintenance of law and order has always been a key aim of sovereign government and domestic politics. Indeed, it can be argued that this is the main rationale for sovereign statehood

226 Peter Hough becoming the cornerstone of political order from the seventeenth century, marking the end to an era of the arbitrary justice of warlords, barons and invaders. In some cases there is also a long history of crime becoming a concern to governments to the point of it being a matter of national security. The level of influence held by organised crime gangs in southern Italy since their emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, when sovereign authority from Rome was yet to be established, is a case in point, as is the influence of drug barons in Colombia. International crime is also far from new if we consider the export of Italian mafia operations to the US in the early twentieth century and the long history of trading in cocaine and other illegal commodities. However, the national and human security implications of international crime have significantly heightened over recent decades, making law and order the stuff of international, rather than just sovereign, domestic politics. Since the late 1980s crime has become much more internationalised as a side-effect of post-Cold War political change and the onset of globalisation in its various forms. Statistical support for this is inevitably uncertain, but nevertheless pretty compelling. The IMF estimates that the amount of criminally acquired money in the world grew from $85 to $5000 billion between 1988 and 1998 (Kendall, 1998: 264). One of the most comprehensive and reliable studies of international crime, by the Council of Europe, showed that the number of convictions for completed homicide rose from 1.5 per 100,000 people in 1990 to 2.9 in 1996 (CoE, 1999: Table 3.B.1.2). This economic trend has continued and the global black market now accounts for over $2 trillion per year or 6% of global GDP (UNODC, 2011a). Indeed, this may be a conservative estimate since UN data does not give a full account of financial crimes, and Glenny, for one, has suggested that 15% of the global economy is black (Glenny, 2008). The end of the Cold War The end of the Cold War can be understood to have facilitated the rise in the significance of and priority given to crime in several ways. The rise of ‘failed states’ is a striking symptom of post-Cold War insecurity with repercussions for a number of international political issues. Since the 1990s this term has come to be attributed to those countries where a single government could not be said to be in effective political control within its own borders beyond what could be understood as any sort of period of transition or temporary civil strife. In effect, such territories can be seen to be in a permanent state of insurgency or general lawlessness. The preponderance of failed states increased after the ending of the Cold War partly because many such countries lost the patronage of a superpower in a New World Order where they ceased to hold such a strong military security attraction. The classic case of the failed state is Afghanistan. Invaded by the USSR in 1979, Afghanistan became the focal point of the Second Cold War, with the US providing substantial financial and military backing to the mujahideen resistance fighters. The thawing of relations between the US and the USSR saw Soviet Premier Gorbachev announce the withdrawal of troops from the bloody and intractable conflict in 1988. This ended the proxy war between the two superpowers but did not end the conflict in Afghanistan, where rival factions continued to fight out a civil war in the power vacuum created by the sudden disinterest of the world’s two most powerful states. The political legacy of this for the US in terms of the rise of anti-American terrorist groups from the mujahideen is well documented, but Afghanistan also rose again as

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a crucial haven for the global heroin industry. Ironically it was the toppling of the Taliban by the US-led invasion of 2001 that served to increase lawlessness in the country and led to a resurgence in the export of opiates to the West, since that government had begun to clamp down on narcotics production. Somalia represents another quintessential failed state, with much of the country existing in turmoil since the collapse of the Soviet-backed Barre government in 1991. Against this backdrop we can easily see how gangs of pirates have been able to thrive off the coast and become a scourge of international cargo and tourist liners travelling through the region. The pirates themselves have even cited the lack of sovereign authority as a justification for their actions in seizing control of their country’s waters from international criminals: We don’t consider ourselves pirates. We consider pirates those who illegally fish in our seas and dump in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. Think of us like a Coast Guard. (Ali, 2008) Failed states are significant in International Relations because they stand in contradiction to conventional notions of the sovereign state system. Sovereignty is traditionally viewed as the cement that holds together the state system and maintains international order. The crucial component of the multi-faceted concept of sovereignty, enshrined in International Law in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, is that a sovereign state has a government in ‘effective control’. The rise in cases where countries cannot be said to have a sovereign government in effective control – such as in Afghanistan, Somalia or Colombia – is, of course, a recipe for increased lawlessness in the world. Short of the complete sovereign meltdown that characterises failed states are the ‘mafiocracies’ that have emerged as a consequence of weakened state structures resulting from post-Communist change (Godson and Williams, 2000: 113). One of the most prominent features of the post-Cold War political landscape has been the process of transition of many former Communist countries towards the Western model state with a partially free market economy and a democratic political system. Welcomed by most Western governments and analysts as reducing the likelihood of military conflict in the world and even signalling ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992), this wave of democratisation can also, however, be construed as having brought with it new security threats to the world. Transition from a one-party state to a multi-party democracy, and from a centrallyplanned economy to a more diverse mixed economy with private industries and shareholders, is a very difficult process. Poverty and social upheaval are always favourable conditions in which crime can thrive, and even the successful transition states have witnessed increased social problems with black marketeers and illegal traders of various kinds. EU states have helped alleviate this by providing policing advice and training to their eastern neighbours through aid and EU accession preparations, and it is the former Communist countries further east, which have found most difficulty in making the transition to capitalism and democracy, where crime has become most prevalent and of greatest concern to the rest of the world. Rapid, wholesale privatisation programmes in countries without experienced businessmen, shareholders and private bankers inevitably run the risk of leaving key industries in the hands of black marketeers and unscrupulous individuals.

228 Peter Hough Between a quarter and a third of Russia’s economy is widely held to be black, and the murder rate has rocketed since the fall of Communism. Criminal gangs or mafiya are a prominent feature of Russian life, with extortion rackets rife in most cities. These syndicates are generally far from new and can be traced back to gangs that were successfully suppressed in the Communist era. However, additional recruits came from newly-redundant military and security personnel as some of the post-Cold War peace dividend turned to filthy lucre. The influence of the mafiya has also extended into operations in many parts of Europe and elsewhere in the world. Perhaps the clearest illustration of a new security threat emerging in international politics with the ending of the Cold War, and souring the toasts being made to global peace, is the rise in black market trading in weapons-grade nuclear material. Nearly seven hundred incidences of such operations were documented in the 1990s, principally focused in the successor states of the Soviet Union (Williams and Woesner, 2000). Here, President Yeltsin had assumed control from Gorbachev of a country shorn not only of fourteen of its fifteen republics and six colonies, but also of a large chunk of its huge nuclear arsenal. A further example of how post-Communist transition can serve as a catalyst for international crime at the same time as enhancing wider state security is provided by Kosovo. The Yugoslav successor state, fought for and sustained by Western compassion and interest, has become a haven for criminality while its sovereignty slowly evolves. The 2005 UN Drug Report identified Kosovan organised crime groups as the key controllers of heroin trafficking into Western Europe, and the 2007 Report additionally noted that they were becoming important players in the transport of cocaine from South America to Western Europe (UNODC, 2005, 2007). The rise of criminal gangs in the former Communist world and their diffusion into the Western world hence encapsulates the dark side of three generally positive developments in international relations in the 1990s: the fall of the Iron Curtain, democratisation, and globalisation. However, it is, of course, naïve to suppose that transnational crime, and narcotics trading in particular, did not occur during the Cold War years. As well as increasing in incidence in the 1990s, narcotics trading was able to receive greater priority from governments with the shadow of the Cold War no longer obscuring other political issues. It is incontrovertible that the superpowers were prepared to tolerate corrupt governments being involved with or even directing criminal operations if they were in charge of important military allies or client states. Returning to the theme of cocaine and security, we can see several clear instances of Cold War realpolitik trumping serious international crime in superpower foreign policy. The US invasion of Panama in 1989, in the dying days of the Cold War, is a prime example. One of the principal reasons for the breakdown in relations between the two countries, which led to the overthrow of the Panamanian government, was the refusal of President Noriega to yield to US demands to act to curb the flow of cocaine passing through his country to their cities. Noriega’s connections to the drugs underworld were well known to the Americans throughout the 1980s, as a military general until 1987 and as the President thereafter. At that time this was not viewed in such a negative light since he had aided the US in anti-leftist operations in Central America (Tatham and McCleary, 1992). The US’ security for the majority of the 1980s was construed almost entirely in terms of the Communist threat, which Noriega had stood as a bulwark against, rather than in the threat posed by cocaine addiction and related crime in US cities. By 1989 this was beginning to change.

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Similarly, the Soviet Union, whilst no supporter of narcotics, backed the fiercely conservative Communist regime of Eric Honecker in East Germany despite surely being aware of the leader’s personal involvement in importing and selling cocaine. The Soviets also helped supply the Colombian revolutionaries FARC, despite their well-known links to local cocaine cartels. Economic globalisation Globalisation, denoting the increased level of cross-border economic activity and increasingly global political framing of such change, can be seen to have influenced the rise in prominence of global crime in a number of ways. One of these is simply the increased volume of traded goods. The opportunities for trading in legal commodities are much greater than ever before in terms of costs, speed and the existence of global regulations favouring free trade over state protectionism. However, such opportunities are also present for the trade in illegal commodities. It is easier and cheaper for criminals to operate internationally, and the sheer volume of traded goods makes it ever more difficult for state authorities to detect the movement of drugs, arms shipments and other illicit cargoes. Drug traffickers, for example, have come to make effective use of that very symbol of globalisation, the internet, to boost their operations. Gangs are known to have used encrypted websites to communicate and share information on their activities while employing information technology experts as hackers to alter information held on customs databases and create phantom websites to put state officials off the scent of the real sites. A simple illustration of how modern technological aids to commerce can serve murkier purposes also comes with evidence that Australian drug traffickers have brazenly used the web service offered by legitimate couriers, allowing customers to track the location of the goods they are having delivered (INCB, 2002: 2). In addition, the growth of cross-border financial transactions has also presented opportunities to international criminals as much as to international businessmen. Large-scale criminal activity is usually accompanied by money laundering as crime groups seek to protect their ill-gotten gains from state authorities by moving the money around or investing it in legitimate businesses. This process is becoming increasingly globalised as criminal organisations learn to exploit the inadequacies of the sovereign state system by moving money from country to country. Investing the proceeds of crime into legitimate businesses in a state other than where the crime took place illustrates the nature of criminal globalisation’s challenge to the state system. A crucial aspect of a crime may not be construed as criminal in the country where it occurs, and may even be considered to be a beneficial overseas investment. The globalisation of ‘white collar crime’ is another price that governments and individuals have paid for reaping some of the benefits of financial liberalisation. Many governments, such as the US and the UK, consciously began taking a more ‘hands off’ approach to banking and financial services from the 1990s in order to accrue inward flows of investment. While this bore many fruits for a while, such a voluntary relaxation of sovereign controls came to appear more questionable from 2008 when a global recession unfolded as a consequence of widespread shoddy banking practices. Some bankers exploited the laxer regulatory environment, while others went further and blatantly broke laws, feeling sure that they would never be caught. US financier Bernie Madoff was able to carry out frauds to the tune of $65

230 Peter Hough billion for several years on Wall Street before finally being caught and sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009. Political globalisation Globalisation not only provides criminals with the opportunities to widen their operations; it can also sometimes be seen to create new opportunities for crime. Political integration is a by-product of an increasingly interdependent world where states recognise the limitations on independent action in the global economy and work towards ‘pooling’ their sovereignty by creating new, wider economic and political communities with nearby states. By far the most extensive case of such political integration is in Europe with the European Union. The EU is very much a leap of faith since no comparable project has been attempted before, and, as a result, merging together the economic activities of twenty-eight states has had some unintended sideeffects. For example, organised crime groups are known to have exploited the complexity of the EU’s costly and highly bureaucratic Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The payment of subsidies to olive producers has inadvertently helped finance the mafia who have long had an ‘influence’ on that industry in Sicily. The opening up of borders between the member states of the EU since the late 1980s has provided a further boost to the mafia by creating a market for safe passage for illegal immigrants across the Adriatic from East Europe to southern Italy, since from there migrants can more easily head north to wealthier parts of the Union. Drugs and counterfeit cargoes have followed in the same direction. Hence we see the boon to business provided by the EU’s Single Market accompanied by a ‘single market for crime’. The EU has responded to such developments with the establishment of a Justice and Home Affairs ‘pillar’ to accompany measures furthering economic integration and measures to improve coordination between national police forces. Cultural globalisation The global trend towards urban living is a factor behind the rise of crime since city dwellers are statistically far more violent and lawless than their rural counterparts. The homicide rate in the urban municipalities of Brazil is over three times that of the rural municipalities (Small Arms Survey, 2007: 230–231). Deprived urban living is closely associated with the development of criminal gangs, and this is a growing phenomenon in many megacities in both the global North and South. Around one sixth of the world’s population lives in urban slums, the majority of which are in the global South (UN-Habitat, 2003). Urban gang culture is nothing new, but it appears to be globalising not only via migration routes but through the global media. Hence the notorious Los Angeles MS-13 gang have, in recent years, become the biggest gang, and significant societal and governmental menace, in Honduras and El Salvador, two countries with among the world’s highest homicide rates (Hagerdorn, 2005). A further form of global cultural change fuelling international crime is the increasingly internationalised consumption of the products of criminal enterprise. A key reason for global crime is the existence of a global market for such products and services. Rudimentary criminology recognises that controlling crime is about tackling the demand as well as the supply side of the activities, but such logic is often lost in the traditional conduct of international security so focused on externalising threats.

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Sending troops to Colombia to fight drug barons seems like a ‘tough’ response to the problem, but the tougher challenge for Washington and London is to make cocaine less attractive to their citizens. As with many security issues, there is a tendency to see global crime as emanating solely from the ‘badlands’ when much of the problem actually lies closer to home. The consumers of drugs, cheap pirated goods and sex worker services perpetuate these areas of global crime, and these people generally reside in wealthy and apparently respectable countries. Criminal globalisation A key factor in the globalisation of crime is the increased tendency for organised criminal groups to follow the lead of transnational corporations and work with the phenomenon, consciously setting up operations in a number of other countries. Cheaper international travel costs favour criminals as much as they do other profit-seeking individuals. Godson and Williams describe how transnational criminal organisations can come to utilise a home state from where they direct operations, a host state where they carry out crimes or sell their produce, a transportation state where criminal activities will seek to ensure an unhindered passage of goods to the host state, and a service state in countries where favourably secretive banking laws allow for profits to be secured (Godson and Williams, 2000: 115). Hence, a genuinely transnational operation can be established where, for example, a Colombian-based narcotics gang could secure access to markets in the US by bribing Mexican officials to permit the transit of the drugs, and then invest the proceeds in a Cayman Islands offshore bank account. The greatest security threats may not be at the point of source or distribution of the criminal enterprise. Over 40,000 Mexicans were killed between 2007 and 2012 in the context of internecine criminal wars based on the transit of South American narcotics into North America (BBC, 2011). At the 1994 United Nations Conference on Internationally Organised Crime, UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali referred to an ‘empire of criminals’ to highlight the problem of globally operating criminal gangs, but also to illustrate the fact that many of these organised gangs were cooperating with other, likeminded groups to extend the reach of their operations. There is a long history of criminal gangs extending their influence into other countries, but this has traditionally been in line with patterns of migration. Hence the mafia’s influence in the US from the 1930s followed large-scale Italian migration, and, to a far lesser extent, Jamaican yardies and Hong Kong triads extended operations to the UK from the 1980s. The 1990s, however, witnessed the increased formation of strategic alliances between transnational criminal organisations exploiting changing political rather than demographic circumstances. Russian mafiya are known to have linked with South American criminal cartels in ‘guns for drugs’ marriages made in hell (Williams, 2001: 75–76). International criminal cooperation can sometimes even thrive where societal and governmental cooperation is absent. Serb and Albanian gangsters, for example, are known to have worked together extensively in human trafficking operations in the Balkans (Williams, 2006: 198).

Crime and national security In some countries state security has long been as much a domestic political issue as an international one. In Italy during the Cold War, for example, the domestic threat posed

232 Peter Hough by political violence (most notably the Red Brigade) and criminal violence (most notably the mafia) dominated state security policy to much the same extent as the Soviet threat preoccupying the rest of Western Europe. This fact manifests itself in the existence and prominence in Italy of the paramilitary police force the Carabinieri, in contrast to its relatively modest military capabilities. This situation, though, has become more common as more countries have turned to paramilitary policing in recent years as a blurring of the distinction between internal and external security has prompted a commensurate blurring of the traditional roles of the military and police. For example, the US has seen the number of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) police operations rise from 3,000 per year in the 1980s to around 40,000 per year in the 2000s (Kraska, 2005). Colombia epitomises the security threats posed by crime. The technologically advanced and international military operation mounted to assassinate Colombian drugs magnate Pablo Escobar in 1993 illustrates how crime had entered into the realms of ‘national security’ in the post-Cold War years. Escobar was finally killed after US special troops the Delta Force and various crime-fighters from the US were brought in to help by an exasperated and pressurised Colombian government. As well as representing a major Human Security threat to ordinary Colombian and foreign citizens, criminal organisations (in tandem with violent political organisations) have seriously undermined the capacity of the government to rule the country. Foreign troops have been called in to fight drugs barons while a large tract of Colombian territory was, for a number of years, conceded to ‘narco-terrorists’. Colombia is an extreme case, but in many countries throughout the world governments are increasingly threatened or undermined by armed groups terrifying their citizens, damaging their economy and corrupting their institutions. However, the limits of a traditional national security response to organised crime become apparent when the criminals infiltrate, corrupt or even become the state. As previously discussed, mafiocracies, where criminal syndicates buy into crucial aspects of the state apparatus and win political influence, and failed states, where law and order breaks down completely, have become more commonplace in recent decades. Longer established are kleptocracies where the governing institutions are themselves the source of criminality, with elites wilfully exploiting their citizens through embezzlement and corruption. The term was coined in particular reference to the notorious rule of Mabuto in the Congo from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, when huge amounts of taxes and foreign aid were siphoned off for ornate palace furnishings and secret bank accounts, but it has continued currency in reference to several contemporary tyrants in Africa and Central Asia.

Crime and Human Security Perhaps most pertinent to the consideration of security is the fact that nearly half a million people per year are murdered (UNODC, 2011b) and one in five of all people fall victim to serious contact crime (robbery, sexual crimes or assaults) (Newman, 2002: Chapter 1). The pattern is variable, though, and it is in the Americas and Africa where life-threatening crime is most prevalent. The availability of firearms appears to be a major factor in explaining international variation in homicide rates. Nearly threequarters of all homicides in the Americas are committed using firearms, a rate over three times that of Europe (UNODC, 2011b). The human and economic costs of some of the most prominent forms of transnational crime are summarised in Table 16.1.

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Table 16.1 The cost of transnational crime Annual Economic cost (US$)

Annual Human Cost

1

Corruption

1.6 trillion (vii)

2

Cyber crime

1 trillion (vi)

3

Drug trafficking

400 billion (i)

4

Counterfeits

250 billion (ii)

5

Environmental crime (oil, wildlife, timber, fish)

33.6 billion (ii)

6

Human trafficking

31.6 billion (ii)

7

Stolen goods

20 billion (iii)

8

Maritime piracy

9.5 billion (iv)

11 deaths, 1,000 hostages (iv)

9

Human organ trafficking

0.9 billion (ii)

7,000 victims

Arms trafficking

0.6 billion (ii)

99,000 deaths (viii)

Total

2.1 trillion (excluding tax 450,000 homicides evasion) of which 1.6 trillion is laundered. (i)

10

200,000 deaths (i)

27 million victims (v)

Sources: (i) UNODC (2011b) (ii) Global Financial Integrity (2011) (iii) Baker (2005) (iv) IMO (2011) (v) US State Department (2011) (vi) UK FCO (2011) (vii) BBC (2009) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8350239.stm (viii) Author’s estimate extrapolated from estimates that a quarter of small arms trade is illegal and small arms account for three-quarters of the world’s 526,000 violent killings (Small Arms Survey, 2007)

International political responses to transnational crime The value of international cooperation in policing is well established, but international politico-legal measures to combat crime are relatively recent and generally held to be, as yet, insufficient in the face of the growing problem. Interpol Established in 1923, Interpol is undoubtedly the best known global institutional response to the problem of transnational crime. Its membership is impressively universal with 190 member-states. Each member-state is represented by delegates at the organisation’s headquarters at Lyon, France and each hosts a National Crime Bureau (NCB) which serve as the nodes in an information network to aid state police forces and promote cooperation among them. The 190 NCBs are linked by a computerised database which contains pooled information resources on known criminals and stolen goods, such as cars, to aid in the detection of transnational criminals and speed up the process of their extradition (although the process of extradition is still a bilateral matter between the governments concerned). In addition to this chief function of facilitating the exchange of information, Interpol also seeks to promote greater regional cooperation between police forces (as for example with the Mercosur countries; Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay) and act as a ‘value-

234 Peter Hough added service provider’, giving advice to governments on how to develop extradition agreements and to state police forces on updating their information technology resources. Interpol as an intergovernmental organisation has a conventional decisionmaking structure. Each member-state is represented by a government-appointed delegate at an annual General Assembly, which votes by simple majority on the adoption of new procedures. The General Assembly also elects an Executive Committee of thirteen member-state delegates, which meets three times a year and prepares the agenda for the General Assemblies, as well as managing the implementation of decisions. Day-to-day administration is carried out by a permanent secretariat at Lyon headed by the Secretary General, elected for a five-year term of office by two-thirds majority of the General Assembly (Interpol, 2012). Despite proclaiming among its objectives that it aims to act ‘in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (Interpol Constitution, Article 2), Interpol has always sought to play a non-political role. Article 3 of its constitution makes this clear: ‘It is strictly forbidden for the organisation to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character’. This somewhat contradicts the previous Article since racial and religious persecution are among the crimes renounced in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it would, of course, be impossible for an organisation of this nature to maintain its broad membership without such a precondition. Another limitation to the work of Interpol is its modest budget, derived from member-state contributions calculated on the basis of population and GDP. This point has been clearly expressed by Secretary General Ronald Noble: ‘we have a multi-billion dollar problem being tackled by an organisation running on just 30 million euros’ (Interpol, 2002). Sheptycki, with provocative irony, has argued that where Interpol has grown it has evolved like a series of protection rackets. As a largely informal arrangement, without an explicit treaty or fixed budget, Interpol inevitably ‘chases the money’ and focuses on illicit trade cases referred to it by state police in wealthy countries, rather than tackling global crime in the global interest. Hence issues uncomfortable for any particular state, such as the corruption of government officials or the dumping of toxic waste, rarely occupy the time of Interpol officers on temporary secondment from national jobs (Sheptycki, 2003). Interpol is clearly a valuable resource to police forces around the world in arresting transnational criminals, but in its present guise it can only be a limited player in the development of global policies to arrest the rise of transnational crime. ‘…[W]hat is needed is an agreed calculus by which to allocate policing resources in order for them to be efficiently and effectively targeted on criminal activities that cause social harm’ (Sheptycki, 2003: 53). The World Customs Organisation A similar body to Interpol, the WCO aims to facilitate cooperation between customs officials and coordinate national customs procedures in order to combat illicit trades. Based in Brussels, the organisation is impressively universal with 177 member-states and has been in operation for over fifty years, but like Interpol, it is limited in what it can do in the face of increasingly sophisticated global criminals. By the WCO’s own admission, ‘efficient and effective performance is not spread evenly among all Customs administrations, or in all regions of the world’ (WCO, 2006).

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The United Nations The role of the UN with regards to transnational crime originated in efforts to coordinate action against the trade in narcotics before evolving into activities dealing with other realms of global criminal activity. The UN took over the management of the League of Nations’ work on tackling the narcotics trade, as it did with many functional agencies established by its forerunner. The League’s well documented failures with regards to military security should not obscure its pioneering work in developing global responses to other great threats to humanity. The League’s Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs was transformed into the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), but the UN soon expanded its role and the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs created a sister organisation to the CND, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB). This signalled an attempt by the UN to deepen the global response to an increasingly contentious issue, but the further creation of various groups and programmes over the next three decades served to confuse the picture and prompt a rationalisation, in line with other structural changes to the UN at the close of the Cold War. A special session of the UN General Assembly in 1990 recognised the growing threat posed by narcotics and instigated the creation of a single programme to replace the ‘alphabet soup’ of small UN groups that had developed in this policy area. The UN International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) started operations in 1991 to coordinate UN policy, with the CND and INCB taken under its wing as committees. A further rationalisation of UN operations occurred in 1997 when the UNDCP married its operations to a new body, the UN Centre for International Crime Prevention (CICP) as subsections of the UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC). This step marked a recognition by the UN of the growing significance of a range of transnational criminal operations first evident in the sponsorship of a major conference in Naples in 1994 attended by government ministers from 136 states. The CICP did not appear from nowhere, representing a greatly souped-up version of its predecessor, the UN Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Division (CPCJD). The CICP is very much the junior partner within the UNODC, with a permanent staff of fifteen compared to over three hundred in the UNDCP. It is, however, assisted by a separate forty-strong body, the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ), which is a subsidiary of the Economic and Social Council, the UN’s chief steering mechanism for developing global policy on non-military issues. The CCPCJ cooperates with pressure groups, academics and politicians in organising congresses which produce draft resolutions to direct the CICP in its work of defining ‘internationally recognised principles for criminal justice’. The culmination of the work of these congresses, and a Global Action Plan initiated by the 1994 Naples Conference, was the UN International Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime which was adopted by the General Assembly in November 2000 and entered into force in 2003. Article 1 of the Convention succinctly describes its purpose as being ‘to promote cooperation to prevent and combat transnational organised crime more effectively’ (UN, 2000: 1). Subsequent articles of the convention deal with a wide range of issues relating to transnational organised crime. These are summarised in the following table.

236 Peter Hough Table 16.2 The UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime Articles 2 to 4

definitions and scope of the convention

Article 5

criminalising the participation in an organised crime group

Articles 8 to 10

corruption

Articles 11 & 12

punishment

Articles 13 & 14

international cooperation on confiscation

Article 15

jurisdiction

Articles 16 & 17

extradition

Articles 18 to 22

mutual legal assistance and investigative cooperation

Article 23

criminalising the obstruction of justice

Article 24

witness protection

Article 25

victim protection

Article 26

encouraging public notification of crime

Article 27

law enforcement cooperation

Article 28

sharing information

Article 29

law enforcement training programmes (initiation or improvement)

Article 30

assistance to LDCs in implementing the convention

Article 31

prevention of organised crime at the domestic level

Articles 32 to 41

implementation

Protocols: 1 2 3

Trafficking in persons. Smuggling of migrants. Illegal trading in firearms.

A ‘Conference of the Parties’ has met regularly since 2003 to oversee the implementation and development of the Convention. The Convention is a step forward in terms of providing the basis for greater international harmonisation in tackling money laundering and corruption, but as with most intergovernmental arrangements of this kind, there are no enforcement measures beyond peer pressure. The compulsory sharing of information among parties, for example, is cited as a necessary next step by the UNODC (UNODC, 2010). Europol The rise in cross-border crime in the European Union due to the relaxation of border controls, referred to earlier in this chapter, prompted the organisation in the early 1990s to instigate an Interpol-style institution of its own to coordinate the work of its member-state police forces. Europol was agreed upon at the 1992 Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty), in line with the creation of a ‘Justice and Home Affairs’ dimension to the EU’s political integration process, and came into being in January 1994. Like Interpol, Europol has a central database, The Europol Computer Systems (TECS), serving a system of offices in the member-states. Still in the early

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stages of its evolution, Europol has already outgrown its global ‘parent’. Its budget for 2011 was 84 million euro, more than double the amount it ran on ten years previously. In addition to a permanent secretariat in The Hague, Europol employs 137 ‘Europol Liaison Officers’ (ELOs) in the twenty-seven member-states, principally made up of experienced policemen and customs officers (Europol, 2012). A further way in which Europol has moved beyond the role of facilitating the exchange of information between police forces is in the promotion of judicial cooperation. The European Judicial Network was set up in 1998 as an information exchange service for lawyers in the member-states. In 2001 this development was augmented by the creation of Eurojust, a sister organisation to Europol made up of representatives of the legal professions, such as magistrates and prosecution services. Again, this is spillover in practice, with the drive to improve the detection of transboundary crime being accompanied by a desire to achieve a commensurate improvement in the capacity to arrest tranboundary criminals. The 2008 Lisbon Treaty brought Europol fully into the EU political system with the possibility of unilateral national vetoes ending, with its decisions now made on the basis of qualified majority voting. Given its budgetary and political growth we can thus expect the informational, legal and political roles of the EU in fighting crime to continue to evolve.

Conclusion That crime is a matter of security is beyond dispute, whichever political or theoretical standpoint is employed. While the appropriateness of giving security status to many non-military issues is questioned by many, the maintenance of law and order is almost universally acknowledged as a political priority and in the interests of the state and its people. The legitimisation of sovereign force to uphold the law and maintain internal security may be interpreted very differently from country to country, but it is evident in every functioning state. However, the increasing evidence that sovereign force may no longer be enough to best uphold law and order, due to the rise of transnational crime, has yet to find international political expression. The Head of Interpol, Ron Noble, has expressed this eloquently in an appeal to the international community: No one country can effectively fight transnational organized crime within or outside its borders. Therefore, I submit, countries must relinquish some of their procedural or substantive sovereignty in order for the purpose for which sovereignty exists in the first place to remain intact. (Noble, 2003) At the heart of this issue is a paradox. Historically, the maintenance of law and order is the best argument for sovereignty. In the pre-Westphalian age, without sovereign borders and police forces, justice and protection was arbitrarily applied. Hence, surrendering full and exclusive control over law and order in order to better secure its people and institutions is anathema to most of the world’s sovereigns. To many Realists this would represent a reckless lurch back to the lawless ‘New Medievalism’ of the pre-Westphalian age, but to others, renegotiating sovereignty would be a pragmatic and necessary step towards that most central of political tasks – upholding law and order.

238 Peter Hough Criminals used to exploit the lack of holism in domestic law enforcement by operating across (US) state boundaries or even (UK) county borders until such inappropriate de-centralisation was addressed politically by creating federal/national police forces. Many Liberals contend that this situation has now arisen globally, and that steps towards a global police force are required.

Summary points 1

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Organised crime on an international basis is not a new phenomenon, but it has become a heightened national and human security threat over recent decades by groups exploiting the opportunities provided by post-Cold War socio-political change and globalisation. International political measures seeking to tackle this rising problem of global crime have advanced, but remain stifled by the continuing tendency to treat law and order as a sovereign and domestic concern.

Recommended reading Edwards, A. and Gill, P. (eds) Transnational Organized Crime: Perspectives on Global Security, London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Glenny, M. McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers, London: The Bodley Head, 2008. Madsen, F. Transnational Organized Crime (Global Institutions), Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. UNODC, Global Study on Homicide, Vienna: UN Office for Drugs and Crime, 2011. http:// www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdfs/2014_GLOBAL_HOMICIDE_BOOK_web.pdf, 2013 (Accessed 12.4.14). Williams, P. ‘Strategy for a New World: Combating Terrorism and Transboundary Crime’ in J. Baylis, J. Wirtz, E. Cohen and C.S. Gray (eds) Strategy in the Contemporary World (2nd ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 192–208.