Terrorism Veiling the Attackers, Unveiling the Victims

WRITTEN BY Francesco Candelari

Martin Luther King once said, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” He died 40 years ago, but this statment rings even truer today. In early September, at the United Nations Headquarters, the Secretary General convened a Symposium on Supporting Victims of Terrorism: 18 victims and 10 experts from around the world had an opportunity to speak and break the wall of silence which often confines them behind after the clamor of terrorist attacks.

Afghanistan: Drug Industry

WRITTEN BY Christina Oguz

Interview with Christina Oguz

Christina Oguz is the UNODC representative based in Kabul. Here she shares her experiences in the field. This perspective gives us further insight into what has been achieved so far in the fight against illicit drug trafficking in Afghansitan.You have one of the most difficult jobs in the UN. What lesson have you learned from being a member of UN staff, a western person and a woman in the complex Afghanistan situation, including its nexus between terrorism and organized crime?

Challenges in the Control of Synthetic Drugs Of Abuse

WRITTEN BY Barbara Remberg, Justice Tettey

Synthetic psychoactive substances continue to be the bane of drug regulators worldwide. Even in the 1960s, before the pyschopharmacologist Alexander Shulgin experimented with and published synthetic routes for hundreds of psychoactive substances (in what is perhaps the opening of Pandora’s box in terms of synthetic drugs of abuse), the world has had to contend with the problems of modern times such as the abuse of ecstasy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, MDMA).

Counterfeiting

WRITTEN BY Sandro Calvani, Marco Musumeci

The Hidden Crime

Why does the public opinion not consider counterfeiting as serious a crime as drug trafficking or arms smuggling? First of all, let us consider what a “serious crime” means to law enforcers and to the general public. Certain criminal activities are immediately perceived as “dangerous”. This perception is tied to the threat these crimes pose to the safety or health of citizens and from the links between “dangerous” criminal activities as part of organized crime.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

WRITTEN BY Francesco Marelli, Marian De Bruijn

A Comprehensive Approach

The changing threat

Ever since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ ‘doomsday clock’ is recognized as a symbol for the nuclear threat in the world. The minutes before midnight on the clock demonstrate the actual threat. Since the beginning, the clock’s arm has been moved back and forth, whenever the nuclear threat situation in the world changed. At the end of the Cold War the clock stood at seventeen minutes to midnight, while at the last presentation, in 2007, the clock was ticking five minutes to midnight.¹

A Short History of Trafficking in Persons

WRITTEN BY Kristiina Kangaspunta

Slavery has a history dating back thousands of years. It existed in prehistoric hunting societies and has persisted throughout the history of the mankind as a universal institution. Even though slaves have always been subject to physical and sexual exploitation, the discussion of human trafficking from the point of view of exploitation has a much shorter history.

Interdicting Bioviolence

WRITTEN BY Barry Kelman

Consider the implications of international trafficking of pathogens. Disease has always been ubiquitous, of course, moving via natural currents with little regard for national boundaries. Yet, when the element of human intention is added, the dangers of disease become transformed into an imperceptible weapon of mass destruction. Today, policies to prevent bioviolence (the intentional infliction of disease) must be global. Perpetrators from anywhere can get pathogens from virtually everywhere.

Criminal Assets

WRITTEN BY Radha Ivory

A Little Lateral Thinking

From the start of the movement to confiscate assets from transnational criminals, lawmakers have recognized the overlaps between categories of criminal behavior and organization. As the recent resolutions from the UN Security Council attest, they have seen that one person’s terrorist may be another’s freedom fighter – or organized criminal. Until recently, our willingness to see the links between organized crime, drug trafficking, and terrorism, has not been matched by our willingness to see the relationship between corruption and other ‘macro-crimes’.

Curbing Illicit Brokering in the Arms Trade

WRITTEN BY Valerie Yankey-Wayne, Robin Edward Poulton

Challenges and Opportunities

The 2007 UN Group of Governmental Experts on Illicit Arms Brokering defined a broker as a person or entity acting as an intermediary that brings together relevant parties and arranges or facilitates a potential transaction in return for some form of benefit, whether financial or otherwise. Brokering does not necessarily pass through the territory of the country where the brokering activity takes place, nor does the broker necessarily take ownership of the weapons1.

Illicit Exploitation of Natural Resources

WRITTEN BY Rico Carish

Over recent years, evidence of the ruinous effects of the illegal exploitation of raw materials on peace and security in many countries, particularly those with weak governance systems, has been piling up. In the maelstrom of conflicts in Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire, warlords and leaders of militias and rebel movements prospered from the pillaging of their nation’s natural wealth as much as financiers of crime rackets, dishonest civil servants, corrupt politicians or national and international corporations.

Criminal Connections

WRITTEN BY Loretta Napoleoni

Territoriality remains paramount to organized crime, and in a globalised economy the geography of crime expands exponentially. Local criminal organizations are presented with new international opportunities almost daily, as shown by the recent transformation of the Camorra. Over the last few years, the Neapolitan organization internationalised its dirty business by entering into joint ventures with the Chinese Triads operating in Italy.

Human Trafficking on the US-Mexico Border

WRITTEN BY Susan Tiano, Billy Ulibarri, Carolina Ramos

Is there a nexus with immigration policies?

The U.S.-Mexico border presents a distinctive set of challenges for combating human trafficking. The involuntary transport of human beings in order to exploit their labour or sexuality is nothing new. Yet conditions in the current era of globalization—growing economic inequalities within and among nations, increasing flows of labour and products across national borders, and the growth of informal economies and organized criminal networks, to name a few—are causing it to proliferate on a global scale (Farr, 2005).