Fighting Crime!
Tenth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders
Crime and Justice:
Meeting the Challenges of the Twenty-first Century
Vienna, Austria,
10-17 April 2000
Agenda Topics:
- Promoting the Rule of
Law and Strengthening
the Criminal Justice
System
- International Cooperation
in Combating
Transnational Crime:
New Challenges in the
Twenty-first Century
- Effective Crime
Prevention: Keeping Pace
with New Developments
- Offenders and Victims:
Accountability and
Fairness in the Justice
Process
Technical Workshops:
- Combating Corruption
- Crimes Related to the
Computer Network
- Community Involvement
in Crime Prevention
- Women in the Criminal
Justice System
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Mr. Pino Arlacchi
United Nations Under-Secretary
Executive Director, Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention
Director-General, United Nations Office at Vienna
On 1 September 1997, Mr. Pino Arlacchi, an Italian citizen, was appointed Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna and Executive Director of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP), Vienna.
As Under-Secretary-General he is directly responsible to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Mr. Arlacchi was a member of the Italian Senate from 1995 to 1997 and a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1994 to 1995. During this period he was elected Vice-President of the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on the Mafia and Organized Crime, on which he had previously served as adviser from 1984-1986.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Arlacchi established, in his capacity as Senior Adviser to Italy's Ministry of the Interior, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia-DIA, a law-enforcement agency entrusted with fighting organized crime. In 1989, he became President of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime.
In 1992, Mr. Arlacchi was appointed Honorary President of the Giovanni Falcone Foundation in recognition of his commitment to fighting the Mafia. This Foundation was named after the Italian prosecutor and close friend of Mr. Arlacchi who was assassinated by the Mafia in 1992.
From 1988 to 1994, he held an associate professorship in applied sociology at the University of Florence, Italy, and in 1987 he was visiting professor at the Columbia University in New York. From 1982 to 1985, he was associate professor at the University of Calabria. He became full professor of sociology at the University of Sassari in 1994.
Mr. Arlacchi has long served as adviser to those United Nations organizations active in the field of Drug Abuse Control. He has also contributed to studies and has participated in numerous conferences on Drug Control and Crime Prevention held by the United Nations and other international organizations.
His books and publications on the Mafia and organized crime have received international acclaim and have been translated into many languages. His research on the Mafia phenomenon has not only brought him national and international recognition for advances made in criminalistic methodology, but has also paved the way for the enactment of anti-Mafia legislative bills and continues to aid the global fight against the scourge of organized crime.
Born in Gioia Tauro Marina/Reggio Calabria, Italy, on 21 February 1951, Mr. Arlacchi lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He is married and has two children.
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In the new global age, borders have opened up, trade barriers have fallen and information speeds around the world at the touch of a button. Business is booming . . . and so is transnational organized crime.
Fortunes are being made from drug trafficking, prostitution, illegal firearms and a host of other cross-border crimes. Every year, organized criminals are laundering huge amounts of money in illegal proceeds.
"Never before has there been so much economic opportunity for so many people. And never before has there been so much opportunity for criminal organizations to exploit the system," said Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP).
Once viewed as a local or at most a regional threat, organized crime has become a highly sophisticated transnational affair. As the United Nations' 1999 Global Report on Crime and Justice notes: "From the perspective of organized crime in the 1990s, Al Capone was a small-time hoodlum with restricted horizons, limited ambitions and merely a local fiefdom."
Nations have now agreed that international cooperation is urgently needed to curb this growing menace. The problem will be a key agenda item at the Tenth Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, to be held in Vienna in April. Delegates will also be reviewing progress on the draft UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, along with its three protocols to combat trafficking in illegal firearms and persons, especially women and children, as well as the smuggling of migrants (see Fact Sheet No.1).
Mimicking "legal" business
Large criminal groups may mimic legitimate business by striking multinational alliances to extend their reach and push up profits. The Hong Kong-based Triads and the Japanese Yakuza market synthetic drugs and traffic in women and children for sexual slavery on a global scale. According to Colombia's National Police, the country's powerful drug cartels are "dealing" with the Russian Mafia and eastern European crime groups.
As in legitimate business, larger criminal groups may also diversify into a wide range of "commodities", using the same routes, networks and even corrupt officials to move people or goods. One of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world - the Japanese Yakuza - traffics drugs, runs prostitution rings, engages in gun smuggling and specializes in corruption, according to UN sources.
And just as legitimate companies move in to fill voids in the product market, new organized crime groups suddenly emerge where profits are to be made.
In Mexico, organized criminals have appeared who are running large-scale drug trafficking rings, a criminal arena monopolized by Colombian cartels in the past. According to a 1999 study by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, some 29 per cent of heroin consumed in the United States filters into the country through the hands of Mexican organized criminals.
New groups have also sprung up in Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union, where the end of the Cold War and crumbling state control has been an open invitation to organized crime. Criminal groups have been quick to reap profits from struggling democracies, shaky or non-existent laws, ill-equipped police forces and uncertain market
forces.
Post Cold War Crime
The number of known criminal groups in Russia increased between 1990 and 1997 from 785 to an astronomical 9,000, with a combined membership of more than 100,000, according to the country's Interior Ministry. In Moscow, some 189 criminal organizations were active in 1996, of which 23 had branches abroad.
The Ministry estimates that about 40,000 Russian businesses are controlled by organized crime. Among these are law firms, banks and other businesses that can launder money, many with global links.
Organized crime groups have also set up shop in several countries of central Europe, where vast sums are being made in guns, prostitution, extortion, car theft, black market oil and cigarettes. The region is also a major entry point into Western Europe for heroin. And along with the countries of the former Soviet Union, it is the fastest growing source region for trafficking in persons.
About 175,000 trafficked individuals, many of whom are women and children, leave annually from these nations for Western Europe and the United States, according to the International Organization for Migration (see backgrounder No?-- New Global Treaty to Combat Sex Slavery of Women and Girls). (numbering to be determined
soon)
Cracking Down Locally
Although transnational organized crime has become increasingly sophisticated, law enforcers worldwide have made some progress in rounding up ringleaders and closing networks down:
- Colombia has cracked open two enormously
powerful cocaine cartels in the cities of Cali and
Medellin and imprisoned their main bosses.
Earnings from the export of all illicit drugs in
Colombia have dropped by half - from a record
high of four billion dollars in 1984 to two
billion in 1996, according to a recent study;
- Law enforcers, coupled with an ambitious alter
native development programme, have torn apart drug cartels in Bolivia, causing the coca economy to drop from 9.2 per cent of gross national product (GNP) a decade ago to the current three per
cent;
- In South East Asia, some of the most famous
drug lords of the former Golden Triangle have negotiated with governments their withdrawal from the drug
trade;
- In Italy, the public and law enforcers alike have
banded together to crush the Mafia. The Mafia stronghold of Palermo, Sicily, reported only seven homicides and no Mafia murders in 1998, compared with 200 in 1992.
Despite these local successes, transnational criminals continue to extend their tentacles worldwide, foiling law enforcers by hiding out in "safe" countries or changing trafficking routes from one nation to another when the trail gets hot. Nations have agreed that action must occur at the international level if this worldwide threat is truly to be beaten.
"No country can cope successfully on its own with the growth of international crime. We know that the combination of corruption, organized crime and money laundering - what is called "crony capitalism" - can upset political, economic and social systems", Mr. Arlacchi
said.
Joining Forces Internationally
The international community already has major treaties in force against drug trafficking and money laundering, including the 1988 UN Convention against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. And in 1998, the UN General Assembly had a special session on drugs, where it adopted new strategies to eradicate both the supply and demand for illicit drugs.
Over the past year, the ODCCP has launched three global programmes, which aim to help nations assess and combat corruption and trafficking in human beings as well as collect data about organized crime worldwide.
But until now, a powerful international tool to fight all forms of transnational organized crime has been lacking. This void will soon be filled by the proposed Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its three protocols to control illegal firearms and counter trafficking in persons as well as the smuggling of migrants.
The treaty has two main goals. One is to eliminate differences among national legal systems, which have blocked mutual assistance in the past. The second is to set standards for domestic laws so that they can effectively combat organized crime. (See fact sheet No.1 on the draft United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime).
The new convention also aims to tackle the root cause of transnational crime - profit. It will include strong measures that will allow law enforcers to confiscate criminal assets and crack down on money laundering. And it will call for the protection of witnesses.
"To combat transnational organized crime, a new sort of mentality must be created - one that understands and is capable of putting up organized resistance", said Mr. Arlacchi. "Above all, the international community needs to act more effectively than the criminal organizations that threaten us." |
