FutureIssues for the Comparative Crime and Justice Community

Withthe assistance of transnational organizations such as Interpol, the UN, WorldBank, the IMF, and the EU, we are now better able to identify the various crimeproblems around the world. Better and clear identification of terms has beenessential for those working in the system as they try to reduce crime but alsofor those who study crime and form laws and crime policies. With the growth intechnology, especially mobile communication devices, we now assume that manymore citizens in our global community are aware of the kinds and extent oftransnational crimes that affectall of us. In recent years, stories about human trafficking, money laundering,piracy, terrorism, and more recently, crimes against humanity have been morecommon and certainly disseminated more broadly.

Itmay be, however, that the international cooperation among nations relative tolaw enforcement and adjudication is probably the most visible and importantdevelopment in criminal justice in the last decade. Beginning in the 1980s withthe onset of the war on drugs and international drug trafficking, lawenforcement agencies around the world began to collaborate more consistently todeal with this problem. With the events of 9/11/01in the United States, the issue of global terrorism became paramount, and oneresult has been the intensified cooperation between national and internationallaw enforcement agencies. In recent years, more international and regional lawenforcement agencies such as Interpol, Europol, the Asian Nations Chiefs ofPolice, and various African police chiefs cooperation organizations (e.g., EastAfrica Police Chiefs Cooperation Organization) have worked to more effectivelyshare information about criminal activity, location of criminals, andsuccessful policing strategies.

Asmore transnational criminals have been caught, there has also been a greater effortto express outrage toward the offense and the offender. Those accused of themost serious crimes of international concern—namely, genocide, crimes againsthumanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression—have recently come to be heldresponsible by the courts. When appropriate and within the rights of nationalsovereignty, the majority of these transnational offenders are tried andpunished according to the laws of a particular country. However, in some partsof the world, the problems of global crime and justice have often become toocomplicated for national or regional courts to handle. In response, theinternational community has developed three forms of supranational courts thatdeal directly with criminal matters in violation of international law. Each hasa judicial body with a higher legal standing than decisions of courts inindividual countries. The first are ad hoc tribunals, the second is a permanentinternational criminal court, and the third are recently formedinternationalized courts.

Eachof these three types of courts has had various levels of success relative tothe prosecution and conviction of transnational offenders. The ad hoc tribunalsfor Yugoslavia and Rwanda have combined for over 120 convictions since theirformation. The first permanent criminal court, the International Criminal Court(ICC), has slowly gained acceptance in the international community. As of Julyof 2012, Guatemala became the 121st State Party to the join the ICC.Internationalized courts, also called mixed tribunals or hybrid courts, operatewith the support of the United Nations to prosecute those responsible forcrimes against humanity, war crimes, and violations of domestic law. Thesecourts are similar in that they generally are located in places where the crimesoccur and they use law and judges from the international and domesticjurisdictions. On April 26, 2012, the judges for the Special Court for SierraLeone convicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor of 11 counts of warcrimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 11-year civil war inSierra Leone that ended in 2002 and left more than 50,000 dead. The Taylortrial is significant because he is the first head of a state to be brought tojudgment by an international tribunal since WWII.

Althoughpredicting future issues in any area is always risky—it would be easy tospeculate that the coming decades will see continued increase in transnationalcrime and more transnational cooperation to combat that crime, we think whatmay be less obvious are the following trends:

First,if the recent past is any predictor of the future, we will see continued growthin the blending or convergence of criminal justice systems around the world.One system example of this is in the area of criminal procedure, morespecifically in the convergence of the adversarial and inquisitorial systems ofjustice. Civil law countries, even those in Latin America that have in the pastheld tightly to the principles of inquisitorial justice, have adopted many ofthe rules of procedure that protect the accused from arbitrary action by thestate. Many civil law countries have also begun to show an increasingprominence of attorneys during trials, the concomitant diminishing of judicialauthority, a shift in emphasis from the pretrial to the trial phase, and thereduced reliance on the accused as a source of testimony. Common law countrieshave modified the excesses of the adversarial system by allowing for pretrialinvestigations, by allowing judges to participate more actively in trials, andby making various arrangements for avoiding trial through the use of pleabargains and various forms of mediation. Convergence can also be seen in theIslamic and Socialist legal systems. In Saudi Arabia, Islamic law reflects theinquisitorial system through strong cooperation between the judge and the investigator. In addition, thedefense attorney is less adversarial than in common law trials. At the sametime, Islamic law includes provisions for the right to confront accusers andeven to remain silent for the presumption of innocence. With the global sharingof information and the growing influence of international law and supranationalcourts, convergence of systems and criminal justice practices will increase.

Second,relative to the issue of supranational courts, we have another prediction thatmay be more precarious in nature or at least more controversial. As wementioned earlier, in response to serious violations of international law theinternational community has developed various forms of supranational courts.Although it may appear that the growth of these courts is inevitable, there arestill many questions and problems that surround them. Among the key issues ofconcern are cost-effectiveness, logistics of implementation, and politicalinfluences. It is estimated that from 1993 when the first wave of the currentsupranational courts were formed (beginning with the International CriminalTribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [ICTY]) until the proposed time (2015) thatmost of them will close, the international community will have spent nearly$6.3 billion. As a result, many have questioned whether the effectiveness asmeasured by the scant number of convictions is worth the incurred cost. Anothermajor issue is the problem of implementing the process of justice from arrestthrough incarceration. Supranational courts do not have their own police forcethat is able to gather suspected criminals and bring them to the respectivecourts for prosecution. In the few cases that have been prosecuted, the courtshave been at the mercy of suspects turning themselves in, or in a fewincidences they have been able to execute arrest warrants with the fullcooperation of member states. Relatedly, if a conviction is obtained, then thecourts must find member states willing to incur the costs and security risksassociated with long-term incarceration. Probably the biggest hurdle ofsupranational courts, however, is their inability to gain full politicalsupport of key member states. Can supranational courts really gain influenceand respect around the world stage if major powers do not support them? Forexample, among the U.N. member nations that do not support the ICC are theUnited States, China, and Russia. Individual countries have various reasons fortheir decision to support supranational courts, but probably the most common isthe fear of giving up state sovereignty. Many countries, especially those whohave a long history of having unbridled global power, are concerned about answering to any international body.It is clear that supranational courts have gained legitimacy over the last 20years, but we predict that these and other hurdles will need to be addressed ifthey wish to grow in acceptance and achieve sustained success. If not, there isa chance that the supranational court movement will flounder.

Finally,we believe that in the coming years, understanding the etiology of crime in anyone country will be inextricably linked to the study of crime more broadlyaround the world. It is becoming increasingly clear to many criminologists, notonly those who specialize in comparative and transnational criminology, that itis difficult to understand the problems of local or domestic crime without anattempt to study more broadly the relationship to global crime and itssolutions. This is not a new idea; it is one that has been building in theliterature at least for the last decade. Think of the examples of humantrafficking or drug trafficking or corruption or even more dramatically thecrime of genocide. It is not difficult to see that without an understanding ofthe economic and social conditions of the countries involved, that to arrive atany viable solutions would be problematic.

Theidea of understanding crime in a broader context has been recently been coined“global criminology.” In global criminology, crime that makes victims in one ora number of countries may actually have been “created” or may have its “locusdelicti” in an unknown country or one separate from the victimized country.Financial crime and cybercrime are obvious examples of global crime. Anyserious reader of transnational crime will observe that criminologists fromaround the world have come to see global criminology as the logical extensionof what has been in past referred to as comparative and internationalcriminology/criminal justice study.