Globalization of Crime PDF

GLOBALIZATION: GLOBALIZATION OF CRIME SPRING 2023/2024 TRANSNATIONAL CRIME As unprecedented openness in trade, finance, travel, and communication has created economic growth and well-being, it has also given rise to massive opportunities for criminals to make their businesses prosper. Organized...

GLOBALIZATION: GLOBALIZATION OF CRIME SPRING 2023/2024 TRANSNATIONAL CRIME As unprecedented openness in trade, finance, travel, and communication has created economic growth and well-being, it has also given rise to massive opportunities for criminals to make their businesses prosper. Organized crime has diversified, gone global and reached macro-economic proportions: illegal goods are sourced from one continent, trafficked across another, and marketed in a third. Mafias are today truly a transnational problem: a threat to security, especially in poor and conflict-ridden countries. And crime is fueling corruption, infiltrating business and politics, and hindering development. TRANSNATIONAL CRIME And it is undermining governance by empowering those who operate outside the law: 1. Drug cartels are spreading violence in Central America, the Caribbean and West Africa. 2. The smuggling of migrants and modern slavery have spread in Eastern Europe as much as South-East Asia and Latin America. 3. In so many urban centers, authorities have lost control to organized gangs. 4. Cybercrime threatens vital infrastructure and state security, steals identities and commits fraud. 5. Pirates from the world’s poorest countries (the Horn of Africa) hold ransom ships from the richest nations. 6. Money laundering in rogue jurisdictions and uncontrolled economic sectors corrupts the banking sector worldwide. ILLEGAL FLOWS What is striking about the global map of trafficking routes is that most illegal flows go to, and/or come from major economic powers. In other words, the world’s biggest trading partners are also the world’s biggest markets for illegal goods and services. What could be the reason? This is a logical consequence of the huge increase in the volume of trade, and it reflects the extent to which the underworld has become linked to the global economy. Thus, profiting crime. TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME Transnational organized crime can have an impact on political stability in countries. Human trafficking A greater variety of nationalities of victims have been detected in Europe than in any other region. After a strong increase at the end of the Cold War, human trafficking to Europe for the purpose of sexual exploitation appears to have stabilized, with women from a wide variety of countries displacing the Eastern European victims that formerly dominated this market. TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME With the end of the Cold War, a large number of laborers of all sorts moved from Eastern to Western Europe. Some of these laborers were or became sex workers, and not all came voluntarily. In 2005-2006, 51% of human trafficking victims detected in Europe were from the Balkans or the former Soviet Union, in particular Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of Moldova. But this appears to be changing, as women trafficked from other parts of the world are becoming more prominent. In many instances, women, some of whom may have once been victims themselves, play an important role in exploiting the victims. The traffickers are often of the same nationality as the victim. TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME Migrant smuggling The two most prominent flows are the movement of workers from Latin America to North America and from Africa to Europe. The smugglers are often opportunistic entrepreneurs. TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME Due to global inequalities and restrictive immigration policies, many workers from developing regions are willing to borrow heavily from their communities and risk their lives to access opportunities in richer countries. Since they cannot do this legally, they often employ organized criminals to assist them, and become more likely to do so as immigration controls tighten. Because these services are illegal, those who provide them have tremendous power over their charges, and abuses are commonplace, particularly when the movement is illegal. TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME Heroin trafficking Around 90% of the global heroin supply comes from opium poppy cultivated in Afghanistan, and the majority of this is consumed in Europe, the Russian Federation and countries en route to these destinations. TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME Firearms trafficking Traffickers service two primary markets for illegal arms: 1. Those who need weapons for criminal purposes (such as the flow from the United States to Mexico) 2. Those who need them for political ones (such as the flow from Eastern Europe to Africa). Different types of arms and techniques are implicated in each case. TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME The United States of America is an obvious source of weapons for criminals in Mexico. Weapons are inexpensive in comparison to countries where firearms sales are highly regulated, such as Mexico. It appears that most of the firearms trafficked into Mexico are purchased from one of the gun dealers along the border with Mexico and driven across the border by a large number of cross- border smugglers. Very small batches of weapons are moved across at the regular crossing points, concealed in private vehicles. About 88 million passenger cars cross the border each year, and most of those crossing the border do so every day; a single smuggler can transport more than 500 weapons per year in loads too small to be suspected as organized trafficking. An estimated 20,000 weapons are trafficked each year, worth at most US$20 million. TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME Maritime piracy The traditional robbery on the high seas has been transformed into a form of kidnapping for ransom. As Somali pirates, sometimes directed by shipping industry insiders, seek a growing number of targets further and further from their national waters. TRANSNATIONAL CRIME The Global Financial Integrity Report on Transnational Crime estimates that the total global value of all trafficking is between $1.6 to $2.2 trillion, with drug trafficking making up the largest share. ILLEGAL FLOW While organized crime groups can become problems in themselves, eliminating these groups is unlikely to stop the illegal flow. National efforts have successfully diverted production or trafficking to other countries, but as long as there is demand, national law enforcement alone cannot solve the problem. Rather, global strategies, involving a wide range of both public and private actors, are required to address global trafficking. In many instances, this means regulating international commercial flows that have grown faster than our collective ability to manage them. GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONAL CRIME While globalization has made some forms of transnational crime easier to carry-out, the fact that ‘transnational crimes have always happened’ suggests the relationship between the two is not a causal one. Some aspects of globalization can in fact decrease the causes for transnational crime. For example: The present scale of cigarette smuggling could not be imagined if similar countries did not maintain such large differences in taxation. In other words, if economic globalization creates the conditions under which different countries ‘agree’ to standardize their taxation systems, then transnational crimes such as cigarette smuggling would effectively cease to exist since there would be no profit in it for criminal organizations. DEBATE QUESTION “The reality is that many of the most famous cities around the world rely on money laundering to fuel their real estate booms.” GROUP J GROUP F FOR AGAINST 1. Aisha Khalifa Abdulla Bin Belaila Almheiri 1. Shaikhah Mohamed Naser Humaid Maqdami 2. Ali Ahmed Saif Saeed Almehrzi 2. Shamma Khalid Saeed Salim Alnaqbi 3. Ghaith Badir Ahmed Abdalla Almusharrekh 3. Aisha Saeed Salim Hedairim Alketbi 4. Hajar Abdalla Mohamed Marzouq Almarashda 4. Alyah Hassan Mohamed Hassan Alzaabi 5. Abdulla Matar Mohammed Saeed Alketbi 5. Khadija Yousif Ahmed BinBella AlAnsaari