Over the past three years, Southeast Asia has been grappling with one of its biggest and most complex regional challenges — transnational organized crime (TOC). A recent report by UNODC shows how this sophisticated criminal enterprise is not slowing down, but rather expanding and incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into its operations.
What does this entail and why is it important?
The basics
Growing in strength and sophistication, criminal networks have expanded their markets and operations to include the exploitation and trafficking in persons (TIP) of thousands of people for mass scale financial fraud operations —trafficking for forced criminality— a phenomenon that is intertwined with cybercrime, financial fraud, extortion, the laundering of billions of dollars of illicit profits, and corruption embedded in private and public sectors.
These illicit activities are taking place in various legal and illegal entertainment establishments, such as casinos, hotels, and registered companies (businesses), which operate from compound-like buildings where victims are harboured and forced to commit, or be complicit in, cyber-enabled crimes.
What can be done?
Although the region is mobilizing a range of responses, there are still considerable gaps in approaching and contextualizing TIP for forced criminality as a part of transnational organized crime. UNODC research and extensive work with frontline agencies and criminal justice practitioners from Southeast Asia and beyond shows that three main challenges have largely remained unaddressed, namely:
1) Understanding what TIP for forced criminality is,
2) Investigating and prosecuting transnational organized crime, and
3) Utilizing international legal cooperation mechanisms.
From a criminal justice perspective, all three can be addressed by applying the strategic litigation approach to create an environment for systemic change.
What is strategic litigation?
Strategic litigation is the identification and pursuit of legal cases as part of a strategy to bring about broader systemic change, by applying a multidisciplinary, targeted and human rights approach.
Since the beginning of this trafficking in persons crisis, UNODC has been advocating for applying the strategic litigation approach and working with countries to prioritize investigations and prosecutions targeting high-level figures within organized crime networks who are benefiting from TIP for forced criminality. Most current efforts are focused on pursuing lower-level traffickers (recruiters, controllers) or lower-level individuals, in a domestic context, rather than dismantling the broader criminal structures that support TIP for forced criminality.
UNODC calls for strategic litigation that combats all forms of poly-criminality linked to TIP, targets both natural and legal actors, and utilizes both criminal and civil pathways. To realize and ensure the suitability of the strategic litigation approach against transnational organized crime, UNODC is developing a multi-dollar programme that will build on existing and overarching regional and national (counter trafficking) programmes to strengthen the rule of law in the region.
What is UNODC doing now to address transnational organized crime?
To help states achieve this goal, UNODC is implementing a multilateral and strategic programme across Southeast Asia to build foundations for strategic and regional litigation against TOC. This programme starts with delivering advanced training on victim identification and investigation of TIP for forced criminality, with links to cyber and money laundering crimes, while focusing on specialized investigative techniques. UNODC is also supporting states in developing specialized taskforces able to match the sophistication of transnational organized crime operations.
Enhancing investigative capacities across the region runs in parallel with UNODC efforts to empower criminal justice actors, conduct in-depth research, and actively advise countries with respect to required legislative changes to be able to prosecute all aspects of poly-criminality associated with transnational organized crime, including large-scale money laundering, cyber-enabled crimes, and corruption.
Given that transnational organized crime, including TIP for forced criminality, usually involves multiple jurisdictions, UNODC is also at the forefront of ensuring that law enforcement and prosecutors from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have the ability to cooperate, including though the establishment of an Emergency Response Network (ERN) and the Southeast Asia Justice Network (SEAJust) as well as by leading on an initiative to better understand the challenges of international legal cooperation in trafficking in persons cases in partnership with ASEAN-ACT.
UNODC has also developed key indicators of TIP for forced criminality to commit cyber-enabled crimes, which can be accessed here.
To learn more about strategic litigation and UNODC efforts, and possible collaboration, reach out to:
Sylwia Gawronska, Regional Programme Advisor, Human Trafficking & Migrant Smuggling at sylwia.gawronska@un.org
