Universal Crime Research Articles

Southeast Asia's maritime piracy: Challenges, legal instruments and a way forward

Piracy is considered a critical maritime security threat in Southeast Asia. Whilst piracy has always been a perennial problem in the region, this threat has received increasing attention over the past few years. Reports published by the International Maritime Organization as well as the International Maritime Bureau show an alarming increase in acts of piracy on Southeast Asian waters over the past decade. In ancient times, the main drivers of piracy were raiding for plunder and capture of slaves; however, in modern times, developments in politics, economics and even military technology have drastically altered the universal crime of piracy. There are a variety of motives behind modern day piracy including economic gains from receiving ransoms from governments or shipping companies, political and even terrorist reasons. However, it cannot be denied that piratical attacks persist and continue. Efforts are being taken by States at the international as well as regional level to combat piracy. At the international level, piracy is addressed in several legal frameworks. The primary legal framework is contained in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows Member States to address piracy in their national legislation. At the regional level, measures taken in order to fight piracy include the adoption of the ASEAN Declaration on the Prevention and Control of Transnational Crime, which includes piracy as a transnational crime. This paper will examine the adequacy of legal frameworks at both the international and regional levels in order to address the current legal measures for combating piracy. Furthermore, it will discuss current challenges in the implementation of anti-piracy measures at the international and regional levels.

New Frontiers of International Criminal Law: Towards a Concept of Universal Crimes

Despite the ambiguities of international criminal law, serious crimes committed, organised, or tolerated by representatives of different kinds of national or transnational power structures are now of concern to the world community. These crimes may often occur in the context of armed conflict, as in the on-going civil war in Syria,1 but they may also form part of a pattern of aggressive behaviour by states or by powerful non-state actors within a society during times of relative peace. They are often directly linked to abuse of political or military systems or to an absence of effective state institutions able and willing to protect civilians against serious harm. Under exceptional circumstances, similar grave crimes might also be committed by smaller groups without any linkage to a real power structure, or even by singular persons, cf. the notion of ‘lone wolf ’ perpetrators of atrocities. The carefully planned terrorist bombing of government buildings in Oslo 22 July 2011,2 and the politically motivated massacre and attempted group destruction of talented young members of the ruling Labour party at Utoya the same day,3 serves as a reminder that no society is immune from exposure to shocking crimes of global concern. The singular perpetrator of both these

Universal Crime, Particular Punishment: Trying the Atrocities of the Japanese Occupation as Treason in the Philippines, 1947-1953

RESUMEE Nach dem Ende der japanischen Besatzung der Philippinen 1945 wurden dort Prozesse zur Verfolgung von Kriegsverbrechen und von Landesverrat initiiert. Wahrend im ersten Fall eine universalistische Kategorie von Verbrechen zur Strafe stand, ging es im zweiten Fall meist um den Verrat an der Nation, die als Opfer de! niert wurde. Im Januar 1948 erklarte Manuel Roxas eine Prasidialamnestie fur alle des Landesverrats Beschuldigten mit Ausnahme von Kollaborateuren aus dem Militar und der Polizei, Spionen, Informanten und gewalttatiger Verbrechen Beschuldigter. Die meisten der Falle von Landesverrat, die diese Amnestie nicht umfasste, betrafen Personen, die Formen von Grauel begangen hatte, die in Prozessen gegen Japaner als Kriegsverbrechen eingestuft wurden. Dieser Artikel untersucht den Prozess der gerichtlichen Aufarbeitung von Gewaltverbrechen und sexueller Gewalt, meist begangen durch Kollaborateure aus dem Militar und der Polizei, in den Philippinen nach 1945 gemas dem Gesetz gegen Verrat. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Frage, inwiefern ‐ ungeachtet der Tatsache, dass die Kriegsverbrecherprozesse der fruhen Nachkriegszeit den Erwartungen in vielerlei Form nicht entsprachen ‐ die alternative Kategorisierung von Brutalitat im Krieg als Landesverrat nicht auch hochproblematisch war.

Propose Data Mining AR-GA Model to Advance Crime analysis

Historically solving crimes has been the privilege of the criminal justice and law enforcement specialists. With the increasing use of the computerized systems to track crimes, computer data analysts have started helping the law enforcement officers and detectives to speed up the process of solving crimes. According to, solving crimes is a complex task that requires human intelligence and experience. In this research we belief data mining is a technique that can assist law enforcement officers with crime detection problems, so the proposal tries to benefits years of human experience into computer models via data mining. Here we will take an interdisciplinary approach between computer science and criminal justice to develop a proposed data mining model. The proposed model is a three correlated dimensional model; each dimension is a datasets, first one present crime dataset second present criminal dataset and the third present geo-crime dataset. This model apply the Association Rules AR data mining algorithm on each of the three correlated dataset separately then using Genetic Algorithm GA as mixer of the resulted ARs to exploit the relational patterns among crime, criminal and geo-crime to help to detect universal crimes patterns and speed up the process of solving crime with more accurate. This research introduces suggestion to secure the results of the data mining association rules. For privacy preserving secure datasets we aim to hide the general secure and sensitive rules from appearing as a result of applying AR. This could be done by making the confidence of secure rules equal to zero by modifying the supports of critical and sensitive items in these rules. The proposal applied on real crime data from a dependable sheriff's office and validated our results.

Belzec, à la recherche des traces laissées par un centre de mise à mort

There are very few historical traces left for historians studying the Belzec mass extermination center – Operation Reinhardt’s first death camp.Researchers today are able to partly reconstruct the history of this extermination center, mainly thanks to preliminary judiciary inquests carried out by prosecutor Dietrich Zeug in Zentrale Stelle, Ludwigsburg. While searching for survivors, witnesses and perpetrators from Belzec, Zeug stresses the importance that lies in cooperation between the judiciary investigating genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out during the Third Reich and historians specializing in the Second World War. The work carried out by this West German judge also revealed the inadequacy of national law when confronted by universal crimes of this kind, in respect to which legal processes should not be held back by principles such as statutes of limitation.

The ASEAN Way towards Piracy Challenge

Piracy is a universal crime that needs to be combated by all nations. International efforts have been done for many years in order to suppress growth of piracy for international maritime security, which resulted in provisions concerning piracy within United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It refers piracy as a crime taking place on high seas. In addition, International Maritime Organization also attempts to widen the definition of piracy. Even so, tackling piracy requires more than just a commitment of international community to define the term. Efforts must also be conducted by regional community to make them more effective, especially with their national legal instrument. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as the regional organization in Southeast Asia region has sought to better cooperation among the members bringing the six behavioral principles laid in Treaty of Amity and Cooperation 1976 and also ASEAN Charter 2007 for the purpose of eliminating piracy within their region. Unfortunately, piracy is manifestly not easy to be eradicated in reality. This paper tries to identify and analyze the challenges that underlie ASEAN efforts to solve the piracy problem within the region

A Panafrican and International Approach: Combating Piracy Off the Coast of Somalia

A Panafrican and International Approach: Combating Piracy Off the Coast of Somalia

Imagining the International Community: The Constitutive Dimension of Universal Jurisdiction

The assertion of prescriptive and adjudicative universal jurisdictions by some countries in relation to a handful of offenses that are classified as international or universal crimes (e.g. genocide) has led to a great deal of controversy. Those who favor universal jurisdiction argue that certain acts (often crimes) affect all of us, not just the specific individual or group of victims or the country of which the victims are nationals. It is therefore legitimate, they argue, for any state to punish or suppress such acts regardless of any traditional jurisdictional connection between the alleged acts and the state asserting jurisdiction. The availability of universal jurisdiction is premised on the presumed effect of certain crimes on humanity as a whole. Those who commit these offenses are referred to as hostis humani generis —enemies of human kind. Skeptics argue that the idea of universal jurisdiction is conceptually incoherent, inconsistent with the principle of political self-determination, and has great potential to be an instrument of political mischief. While they disagree on the conceptual coherence and utility of the notion of universal jurisdiction, both proponents and opponents view its function in purely instrumental terms, to provide the condition for punishing or suppressing certain offenses that affect all of us. This article argues that universal jurisdiction also serves another, less articulated purpose. It has a constitutive function as well. It is partly a process through which the identity of the international community is imagined and enacted. It is an expression of a sense of ourselves (a community of humankind) at given moments of time. This article argues that neglect of this constitutive dimension leads to an incomplete analysis of universal jurisdiction.

The International Criminal Court: Possibilities for Prosecutorial Abuse

ALFRED P. RUBIN [*] I INTRODUCTION So many problems are present in setting up an criminal court consistent with the current legal, moral, and political orders, that one must at least admire the intensity and dedication of those involved in the effort. It is tempting to conclude that the current orders are simply not consistent with the pattern of a world government that is implied in the notion of a transnational criminal court administering universal applicable to universal crimes. But the attempts to build a superstructure of legal governance on the existing system, using the tools of positive law, have achieved a remarkable degree of superficial success. Thus, it seems appropriate to pause and reconsider the situation. On the face of it, the questions themselves are daunting. Who should determine the content of any criminal law? How should that determination be made? When and to whom should it be applied, and what institutional structure should govern? It is far beyond the power of a single writer to address all these issues in a short compass. [1] A very large group of statesmen and scholars has attempted to grapple with these issues. The result is the Rome Statute for an International Criminal Court. [2] To analyze that attempt definitively at this time is difficult, however, because the statute itself is being expanded and supplemented in ways that substantially revise it. Nonetheless, some issues which seem to be ignored or underrated by those involved in framing the Statute and its implementing regulations seem obvious to those who have had to work with attempts in the past to systematize an hypothesized criminal law. [3] II AUTHORITY OF THE PROSECUTOR One key aspect is the authority of the prosecutor to initiate the process of the tribunal by charging particular individuals with violations of the law set out in the statute-the supposed criminal law. As proposed, the discretion given to the prosecutor is enormous. Thus, the potential for abuse of that discretion is also enormous; and reasonable people may disagree that the discretion will always be exercised consistently with basic concepts of or the rule of law supposedly implemented by the proposed institution. Indeed, if the prosecutor is to act at all, disputes about the conformity of the definitions of international crimes with true law must arise if an accused is to be able to defend him or herself or, if the prosecutor does not act, identical questions must arise as aggrieved victims of alleged atrocities question the failure of the institution to administer at least retributive against those alleged to have committed various atrocities.[4] A. Distribution of Authority under Prior Arrangements Until the impetus for an criminal court reached a degree of intensity that made it politically impossible to stop, individual states had responsibility for formulating appropriate criminal laws and applying appropriate criminal sanctions.[5] This resulted in various unworkable arrangements. Under the Genocide Convention of 1948, for example, only the state in which occurred has the responsibility to criminalize it or to submit accusations of genocide to an tribunal.[6] But the state in which the suspected atrocities occurred is obviously the state least likely to accuse its own leaders of pursuing a villainous national policy while those leaders retain their authority under the municipal constitutional law of that state. If there had been a radical change in government in that state, and the trial were part of a political vendetta against the former leaders, it is questionable whether justice could be done because i t is doubtful that exculpatory evidence would be made available.[7] Similarly, if there had been a negotiated change of government, then questions would arise over whether the viability of amnesties and other legal arrangements agreeable to the parties directly involved should be jeopardized by outsiders. …

Defensible space: a critical review of the theory and practice of a crime prevention strategy

Defensible space is a principle of crime prevention that has become embodied in current public policy through ‘Secured by Design’, a scheme operated by the police providing advice to housing developers. Through enclavization, for instance cul de sac layouts, the intention is to create exclusive living environments, which will precipitate territoriality and a sense of community in residents, resulting in collective action against crime. The implication is that these reactions are invoked by design factors alone. This article is based on doctoral research into the relationship between defensible space design, fear of crime, and community cohesion and informal social control. The aim of the article is to consider the theoretical issues relating to defensible space, including the importance of design in relation to crime, the reliability of territoriality and community in crime prevention, and the effects of excluding strangers by restricting access. It is argued that these theoretical issues are underpinned by problematic assumptions about the interaction of human behaviour and the environment, and the validity of defensible space as a universal crime prevention strategy is therefore questioned. In addition, the adherence by police policymakers to enclavization negates the crime-preventive potential of alternative housing layouts.

The United Nations convention against the taking of hostages: The inside story

Abstract This article briefly outlines the four‐year negotiating process from early 1976 to late 1979, which it was necessary to follow before agreement could be reached and the United Nations General Assembly adopted, by consensus, an international treaty designed to make the act of hostage‐taking a universal crime. The treaty requires that a ratifying state prosecute an international hostage‐taker found within its borders or hand over the hostage‐taker to another state for prosecution. It fills existing gaps in international law by abolishing existing “safe havens” for hostage‐takers. The article focuses in particular on the third and final three‐week meeting of the thirty‐five‐nation Ad Hoc Committee established by the United Nations to carry out this task and shows how agreement was finally achieved.