Saskia Hufnagel talks to us about her new book published by Routledge.
Transnational crimes need to be fought by international law enforcement measures. Cross-border crimes encompass cybercrime, drug, arms and other forms of trafficking, piracy, terrorism and many more. While criminals are well connected across the globe, police struggle to overcome political and legal boundaries. To facilitate law enforcement cooperation internationally and make police communications competitive with the swift operations of criminals, states have concluded bilateral and multilateral treaties and agreements that aim to overcome legal and political differences. Furthermore, international organisations, such as the European Union (EU), the United Nations and the Council of Europe, have established legal frameworks for participating nations that offer possibilities for cross-border police engagement. This has resulted in a ‘patchwork’ system of international policing today which has been claimed to lack efficiency in the fight against transnational crime.
‘Policing Global Regions’ is aimed at providing an overview of the various layers of international, regional, bilateral and multilateral police cooperation frameworks, relating implementation and practice. It analyses in particular the interplay between varying initiatives. As a global analysis is impossible due to the vast amount of such frameworks, the book focuses on four very different regions of the world. First, it addresses the EU as the region where most law enforcement cooperation frameworks have developed. Second, the book analyses cooperation in Australasia, a region even less homogenous legally and politically than the EU. Third, it examines the Southern Chinese Seaboard and its diversity of jurisdictions within one country and finally it explores North American policing and cooperation in the shadow of a global superpower.
Police cooperation in the EU and North America have been widely written about. However, the interplay between law enforcement mechanisms at various governance levels in light of global and regional normmaking has rarely been analysed.
This book is the result of nearly ten years of research on the topic of police cooperation in various regions of the world. The focus is on the EU and its highly formalised system of cooperation with a dedicated agency – Europol – at its centre. Similar systems have not developed anywhere else in the world, but does this mean that cooperation is therefore less functional? Is a supranational system necessary to develop close contacts between police and a swift and efficient information exchange? These were some of the core questions that inspired the research for this book in comparative perspective. From a practical point of view the book explores strategies that enable cooperation which could be transferred between regions or to the global level. The theoretical approach is based on the ‘recursivity of global normmaking’ which is applied to analyse the interaction and overlapping legal frameworks at various global and regional governance levels.
It is concluded that police cooperation happens rather independently of legal and political systems across the globe and is fostered by personal contacts and common crime fighting interests. However, similarities in legal and political systems, economic and political equality between cooperating nations, common human rights frameworks and police cooperation treaties and agreements ensure that both the rights of the suspects and cooperating police officers as well as national sovereignty are protected.
In the multi-layered regulation context of the EU, numerous factors can be said to have promoted norm generation in the field of police cooperation. First, there is no debate that we can consider the EU a ‘security complex’.[1] Throughout history, numerous threats have affected this interconnected region, in particular terrorism, which enabled the establishment of Interpol, TREVI, Europol and the Police Working Group on Terrorism. The crime threat (terrorism) triggered a plethora of both formal and informal global and regional responses originating from European countries. Other crimes which were considered regional problems and responded to by nations jointly were drug criminality, most prominently resulting in the creation of the Europol Drugs Unit, which evolved to become Europol, and financial crime, which led to the establishment of a separate law enforcement
system worldwide and with EU-specific information exchange possibilities in the form of FIU.NET. The perception of an increased threat was even more important in the context of EU normmaking on police cooperation, fostered by the gradual introduction of unenforced borders in the 1980s and shifting the focus from customs to police cooperation. Crime threats, or the perception thereof, within the EU security complex were therefore major contributing factors to the establishment of both formal and informal police cooperation mechanisms.
Second, the governance frameworks that exist in the EU, such as sub-regions under a ‘council’ framework (e.g. Benelux or Nordic council), a macro-region under the Council of Europe (CoE) framework, and the supranational governance set-up of the EU as a union of states, contributed to the formation of both formal and informal, regional and bi-/multilateral, top-down and bottom-up police cooperation initiatives. Within the EU, several groups of states have cooperated long before the establishment of the European Community and developed cross-border law enforcement strategies and legislation based on joint governance frameworks or less formal bi-/multilateral understandings. In sub-regional contexts cross-border practice was for the first time developed into multilateral (sub-regional) legal frameworks and bilateral treaties in the 1950s and 60s, fostered by CoE
conventions that were established around the same time or slightly earlier. Both informal practice within the sub-regions and legal frameworks then impacted on the development of EU legislation on police cooperation. There are hence historical and political factors resulting in particular governance structures that facilitate normmaking and that cannot be observed in any of the other regions examined in this book. None of the other regions, apart from Australasia, have distinct norm generating sub-regions, or a supranational governance framework, the Pacific Islands Forum in Australasia being a part-exception. While all regions
have some history of cooperation, only in the EU has this led to institutionalised ‘learning’ from sub-regional experiences. Implementation and norm generation facilitated by the CoE conventions at bilateral and multilateral levels is also unique to the European context and happened at a time where regulation of mutual legal assistance was not even considered in other parts of the world.
With a view to regional and sub-regional norm establishment in the EU norm entrepreneurs were a major factor. They include individuals as well as organisations. In the European context, one could identify Sir Rob Wainwright, as the reformer of Europol, or Sir Dawnay Lemon, as the founder of the Cross-Channel Intelligence Conference between (first) France and the UK.[2] With regard to organisations, various agencies have established close contacts and cooperation mechanisms, prominently in the border areas of Germany and France and between the Benelux Member States. One of the most important international examples of police entrepreneurialism is probably Interpol, which was established by police for police, although – and rather counterintuitively – police practitioners do not consider it to be a particularly successful mechanism.[3] This could, however, be based on the fact that Interpol has evolved from a regional to a global mechanism and, as a global instrument, cannot provide the same functions as a regional one. Rather than ‘actor mismatch’, which according to Halliday describes a situation where actors are implementing norms but were not involved in their establishment, an inhibitor of implementation is hence the number of participants in a legislative framework or policing mechanism. Interpol could be considered a European police cooperation mechanism as it originated, like the global liaison officer (LO) mechanism, in Europe, and, more specifically, from cooperation between European states. It is hence discussed in more depth below in relation to the interaction between regional and global policing mechanisms.
Another major factor that impacted the establishment of regulation in the EU, and in Europe more generally, was the implementation of regional and international human rights. While the introduction of international human rights instruments did not generally lead to the formalisation of police and criminal justice cooperation mechanisms, the implementation of the CoE European Convention on Human Rights did. It follows that the signing of a human rights convention alone does not create the trust necessary for police cooperation, but where these rights can be enforced, like in the EU and CoE context, cooperation is more likely to ensue. From a practitioner perspective, this is not a major consideration and none of the interviewees mentioned human rights as a promoter for cooperation, but the harmonisation of human rights does facilitate normmaking and, in the EU and the CoE context, created standards of fair trial protection that facilitate the conclusion of supranational, sub-regional and bilateral legal frameworks.
The CoE was a governance framework that, as outlined in Chapters 3 and 4, influenced normmaking in sub-regional European contexts before the formation of the EU, in particular through the 1957 Extradition Convention and the 1959 MLA Convention. Supranational governance, whether creating substantive or procedural legal harmonisation and regardless of its existence at regional or subregional levels, is hence a facilitator of transnational normmaking on police cooperation. Supranational normmaking can equally be linked to respect for sovereignty as the fact that a supranational governance framework can form is a sign of recognition of sovereignty between its Member States. Supranational normmaking bodies furthermore create a perception of equality and actual legal similarity between participating countries. In the present study, a supranational normmaking body only exists in the EU, while Australasia is distinguished by an intergovernmental normmaking forum. North America and Greater China are not subject to a similar overarching governance framework, which could explain their dearth of multilateral police cooperation mechanisms. It follows that, in the EU, supranational governance, respect for sovereignty and a common crime problem are the major promoters of or factors impacting on the regulation of police cooperation.
[1] Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Power: The Structure of International Security (CUP 2003) 45–46.
[2] As discussed in Chapter 4.
[3] See Paul Swallow, ‘Of Limited Operational Relevance: A European View of Interpol’s Crime-fighting Role in the Twenty-first Century’ (1996) 2 Transnational Organised Crime 106, 121.