Smuggling Process Research Articles

Hide‐and‐sniff: can anti‐trafficking dogs detect obfuscated wildlife parts?

AbstractWildlife detection dog (WDD) programs are increasingly being developed to combat illegal wildlife trafficking. However, there is little scientific research available on how sniffer dogs perform when wildlife parts are hidden during the smuggling process, which hampers the effectiveness of WDD programs. Here, we investigate the ability of WDDs to detect wildlife parts that are hidden in legally traded goods. We employed a smell test using the two most smuggled wildlife parts worldwide: elephant ivory and pangolin scales, in combination with two obfuscation items of plant and animal origin commonly employed by smugglers. We then established the sensitivity of the dogs to the target substances. Our results showed that there was a large variation between the two dogs in their sensitivity to ivory and pangolin scales. However, both dogs were generally less sensitive to ivory compared to pangolin scales, and stronger‐smelling obfuscation items could potentially lower the sensitivity of the dogs to the wildlife parts. Our study highlights the potential of dogs to detect hidden wildlife parts, but their effectiveness may depend on other aspects such as training, personality, the health of the dog, the type of wildlife substance, and the obfuscation item used. Given the variability of our findings, WDD programs need to invest in research to optimize the number and type of dogs with the right balance of traits to successfully detect wildlife parts that could potentially be obfuscated during smuggling.

АСПЕКТИ ПРАВОВОГО РЕГУЛЮВАННЯ ЧОРНОГО ЕКСПОРТУ ТОВАРІВ ВІЙСЬКОВОГО ПРИЗНАЧЕННЯ ТА ПОДВІЙНОГО ВИКОРИСТАННЯ

The research on some aspects of legal regulation of military and dual-use goods black exports is carried out in the article. It is based on the analysis of modern views of scientists on the definition of "shadow market of military and dual-use goods", "black export of military and dual-use goods", "gray export of military and dual-use goods", as well as current legislation in relevant field. It is established that the smuggling process is not identical to the process of black export of military and dual-use goods, as the list of its items, as defined by Article 201 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, is much smaller than the list of objects within the process investigated in the article and the inventory of which is stipulated by the state control over international transfers of military goods, approved by the Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine of November 20, 2003 № 1807, as well as the Procedure for state control over international transfers of dual-use goods approved by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine of January 28, 2004 № 86. The articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine according to which actions within the process under consideration can be qualified are given, as well as the ways of improvement of the existing legislation, through modification of article 333 of the Criminal code of Ukraine that will allow to strengthen punishments for the made actions of the investigated process in the conditions of the special period state. The need for further research in the field of legal regulation of shadow markets for military and dual-use goods should be focused on gray exports, which will form a holistic picture of shadow markets for military and dual-use goods and form a single concept of their eradication.

Multinacionales del «smuggling»: un análisis del funcionamiento de la maquinaria del mal

El smuggling de personas desde África Occidental hacia Europa ha aumentado de manera considerable durante el último lustro, convirtiéndose en un elemento clave en la agenda política internacional. Las voces ahogadas en el Mare Nostrum y la escasa capacidad de Europa para dar respuesta a esta situación hacen necesaria una nueva reflexión, más humana, en el estudio académico de este tema de tan rabiosa actualidad. Este trabajo pretende ahondar en uno de los aspectos cruciales y menos estudiados del proceso del smuggling: el funcionamiento de las redes de smuggling que operan en la actualidad en África Occidental; es decir, cómo se desarrolla la travesía desde el país de origen hasta, en el caso de nuestro estudio, Libia, el país de enlace con Europa. El estudio de este tema desde una perspectiva académica pretende constituir una herramienta que facilite la comprensión de la trascendencia del problema y favorezca la creación de proyectos que aborden la situación desde una perspectiva holística.

The Thirst for Tea

This paper seeks to examine the smuggling of tea during the long eighteenth century through several facets. In order to understand why smuggling occurred throughout the eighteenth century, one must take into consideration the laws which necessitated the need for smuggling, as well as the economic environment of Britain throughout the century. In addressing the widescale phenomena of ritualized tea drinking, one can comprehend why tea, specifically, was selected to be smuggled, admittedly among a myriad of other valuable commodities. It is also critical to explore the materiality of tea ritual, as well as the smuggling process, as objects are a crucial element to the narrative and development of tea and its associated illicit activities. Bringing these components of examination together, one may begin to understand why tea was smuggled during the eighteenth century, and how the British government consequently worked to end smuggling altogether.

Crossing the mountain and negotiating the border: Human smuggling in eastern Turkey

AbstractHuman smuggling is a complex process. Made up of actions both organized and chaotic, it compels migrants to deal with different structures and agents of power, among them smugglers, the state(s), and migrants’ own social networks. The current literature on human smuggling provides a detailed analysis of the different phases of this process, within which discussion of the structure and operation of this “business” can be situated. However, only minimal attention has been paid to migrants’ agency in the smuggling process. Engaging with recent perspectives in migration studies, which emphasize the need to conceptualize human smuggling by focusing on the interdependencies between the different actors involved, the analysis developed in this article aims to explore the different phases of the human smuggling process by focusing on the multilayered relations between smugglers and undocumented people. Drawing upon qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted with migrants on the Turkish-Iranian border, the article examines how the physical and sociopolitical conditions of border crossing affect people’s ways of thinking, behavior, and engagement with different structures of power. In doing so, the article attempts to further our understanding of how smuggled migrants mobilize their agency in such a way as to manipulate and challenge the system, as well as of how this process transforms migrants’ capacity to simultaneously recognize and unsettle state bordering practices.

Protecting the rights of children accused of migrant smuggling: lessons from the Australian context

ABSTRACTGlobally, evidence increasingly shows that children act as migrant smugglers. They may fulfil a number of roles in the smuggling process, including as recruiters for smuggling enterprises, guides for smuggled migrants, or crew members of smuggling vessels. Children may participate willingly in such activities, may be intentionally misled, or may otherwise be coerced or forced into certain roles. Their participation in migrant smuggling raises human rights issues for States who apprehend them. For example, in Australia, children arrested and accused of migrant smuggling have been subject to inaccurate age determination procedures, prolonged detention, prosecution, and incarceration in adult correctional facilities. This article examines the Australian context and critically evaluates Australia’s treatment of child smugglers, in order to highlight ways in which States may abrogate the human rights and protection such children are entitled to. It draws on this evaluation to articulate a human-rights-based approach to child smugglers, predicated on international law and best practice, which prioritises human rights and protection over criminal justice objectives. This article argues that children accused of migrant smuggling must be provided certain minimum rights during immigration and criminal justice processes, and are entitled to protection and assistance based on their particular needs and vulnerabilities.

‘My Uncle Cannot Say “NO” if i Reach Libya’: Unpacking the Social Dynamics of Border-Crossing among Eritreans Heading to Europe

This article investigates the role of transnational family networks in facilitating undocumented migration, by analyzing the case of Eritrean refugees on the move towards Europe. Based on the consideration that irregular border-crossing usually involves not only migrants and smugglers but also family members financing these journeys from abroad, I illustrate that their economic support is rarely voluntary. This is mainly due to the moral dilemmas of funding potentially fatal border-crossings. The economic assistance of kin instead results from tough negotiations between them and the migrants in transit. Safety, responsibility, membership of the community and money are at stake in these negotiations. Based on my fieldwork and ongoing contacts with Eritrean refugees on their way to Europe, I show that migrants play an active role in the smuggling process, especially when they move to Libya without their relatives’ permission. In so doing, migrants gamble that kinship and emotional solidarity on the one hand, and the fear of smugglers’ retaliations on the other, will lead their relatives to pay despite their initial refusal. The analysis of these negotiations and of the socio-cultural context in which they are embedded highlights the importance of emic moral rules to a better understanding of mobility and immobility in current refugee scenarios. Specifically, I argue that movers, among prospective high-risk migrants, are those who are more effective in mobilizing economic resources from their transnational networks, exploiting shared moralities and emotional bonds with left-behind kin and relatives abroad.

Heroin: From drug to abuse

Heroin is one of the oldest and most famous among narcotic drugs, whose abuse dates back to ancient times. Chemically, heroin is diacetylmorphine and was synthesized for the first time in 1874. After attempts to use it as a drug, heroine quickly has become the subject of abuse and a prohibited substance. There are four areas of the world production of heroin: South America, Mexico, Southwest and Southeast Asia. Serbia is located on the so-called 'Balkan route of drugs, ' and heroin from Afghanistan usually passes through Serbia. Heroin is the most common drug after cannabis in Serbia. This paper gives an overview of the contemporary tendencies of smuggling heroin, both in Serbia and in the world and makes interpretation of the results of analyses of heroin samples in accredited laboratories of the National Criminal-Technical Centre within the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Serbia for the period 2010 - 2015. The aim was to provide an overview of some activities undertaken by the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Serbia, in the field of combating trafficking and abuse of heroin. An analysis of the data has shown that the largest quantities of this particular drug in the Republic of Serbia are confiscated at border crossings. The research has shown that the area of Belgrade is the most prominent part of Serbia where heroin is smuggled, while the declining trend of heroin abuse was recorded in the North of Serbia, due to the ever-present new psychoactive substances. The largest quantities of seized heroine were mostly in the base format, and the most, so-called daily seizures, are a mixture of heroin with diluents. Purity of heroin samples seized in the territory of Serbia varies, reaching over 40% share in the heroin mixtures. According to the data obtained by this research, smuggling of heroin shows an increasing trend in Serbia for the analysed period. By comparing the EMCDDA data with the data obtained in this study, it can be concluded that there has been a transition in the trend of heroin smuggling and that it has been an intensification of the heroin smuggling process just across the Balkan route.

Scrutinising the double disadvantage: knowledge production in the messy field of migrant smuggling

ABSTRACTHuman smuggling is a global phenomenon which has been difficult to research. Even though there is a large and growing literature on human smuggling, it lacks a systematic review of the major theoretical and conceptual approaches. Besides the lack of conceptual cohesion, there is fundamental lack of hard evidence to substantiate most aspects of the smuggling process because of methodological challenges. This ‘double disadvantage’ is an important explanation for theoretical as well as conceptual discrepancies in existing smuggling studies. In order to clarify and understand the diversity of theoretical approaches within the field of smuggling this article provides an overview of various readings of the literature. We identify a need to better understand how our knowledge about smuggling is constructed in this messy field. Furthermore, we question why we are producing particular types of knowledge and argue for more critical work in the field of human smuggling.

A Survey Study on the Profile of Human Smugglers in Turkey

Illegal migration is an impalpable phenomenon with complicated dimensions. Thousands of people leave their homelands every year due to a number of reasons such as civil wars, terrorism, economic difficulties, and social oppressions. With their flexible modus operandi, migrant smugglers benefit from individuals or groups that wish to immigrate for a more comfortable life. In order to reach a complete perception of illegal migration one needs to draw an accurate profile of migrant smugglers. At this end, data collection from both smugglers as perpetrators and illegal migrants as the object of the smuggling process provides important information for a holistic definition of “smugglers”. In this study researchers interviewed 262 illegal migrants and 174 smugglers captured in Istanbul from 2007 to 2013 in order to identify and develop a profile of migrant smugglers and understand the operating methods of illegal migration organizations. The collected data were analyzed and important results on illegal migrant smugglers were reached.

Human Smuggling to and through Germany

Human smuggling has recently become an important issue in the migration policy debate almost worldwide. Despite suggestions about how to handle this phenomenon ranging from common border policies to an augmentation of legal migration channels, surprisingly little is known about the mechanisms of human smuggling, particularly its organizational principles. This paper aims to give both overview and insight into the organizational principles of human smuggling processes. The empirical results are based upon two different kinds of material, expert interviews, and - almost exclusively in this field - copies of 51 complete court proceedings from all over Germany. They consist, apart from police reports and judgments of the courts, of interrogations of smugglers and smuggled persons as well as smugglers' telephone conversations, which were transcribed and translated. All in all, these cases provide information on several hundred human smugglers and approximately 20,000 persons being smuggled. For each case, the essentials were checked, including the socio-economic characteristics of the smugglers and those being smuggled, which consisted of age, gender, origin, education, and social status. With regard to the smuggling process, the details examined included who commissioned the smuggling, which places were used as stages on the journey, which means of transport were employed, whether forged documents or documents obtained by artifice played a role, the method of payment, the fees paid, the influence of the ethnic group, and whether the smugglers had connections to other criminal fields. The combination of these elements then led toward a typology of human smuggling processes. Three main types of human smuggling processes have been worked out: the first is “individual smuggling with a high degree of self-responsibility”, and although in expert interviews this form of smuggling without pre-organized stages was supposed to be anachronical, in fact it still exists; the second is “covered” smuggling based upon obtaining visa by artifice; the third is “pre-organized stage-to-stage smuggling”, which was divided into three subtypes mainly influenced by the origin of both the smugglers (“stage coordinators”) and the smuggled migrants. Overall, it can be said that in the absolute majority of the cases there is nobody in control of the whole smuggling process like a leader of a criminal organization. For functional reasons, it would also be inefficient for a huge organization to be responsible for a process that comprises distances of several thousand kilometres. Thus, members of an almost entirely mono-ethnic network function as “stage coordinators” while the smuggling actions themselves are outsourced to local smuggling groups. Such a close network of relatively few stage coordinators hardly ever meeting each other is only conceivable under the pre-condition of existing modern communication systems. The coordination level of human smuggling processes, therefore, seems to be an entire part of the migration network. On the other hand, the actions of the local smugglers on the performing level are completely guided by market conditions.

Migrant's Agency in the Smuggling Process: The Perspectives of Smuggled Migrants in the Netherlands

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