Criminal Justice Responses to the linkages Between Terrorism, Transnational Organized Crimes and International Crimes
 

Under the auspices of the Criminal Justice and Rule of Law Working Group, the Initiative on Criminal Justice Responses to the Linkages Between Terrorism, Transnational Organized Crimes and International Crimes aims at exploring the synergies and challenges for criminal justice responses to the linkages between terrorism, transnational organized crimes and international crimes. Many terrorism-related crimes have an international aspect and overlap in scope with transnational organized crimes such as corruption, money laundering, terrorism financing, kidnapping for ransom, illicit trafficking (arms and weapons, drugs, natural resources, cultural property), trafficking in persons, smuggling of migrants and maritime crimes, or with international crimes including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, slavery, and related sexual and gender-based crimes. The linkages raise several criminal justice challenges and trigger questions related to the applicable legal regimes, jurisdiction, cooperation matters and evidentiary challenges. 

In 2018, the GCTF endorsed the Abuja Recommendations on the Collection, Use and Sharing of Evidence for Purposes of Criminal Prosecution of Terrorist Suspects providing guidance to States for the prosecution of terrorism cases. In the same year, the GCTF endorsed The Hague Good Practices on the Nexus between transnational organized crime and terrorism, which encourage a criminal justice approach to the nexus between transnational organized crime and terrorism (Good Practices 1, 2 and 23).  Building on these GCTF Good Practices, this initiative aims at providing policy and operational guidance on criminal justice responses to the linkages between terrorism, transnational organized crime and international crime, and address the challenges mentioned above. Furthermore, it will contribute to operationalize Security Council resolutions that acknowledge the linkages and encourage member states to take appropriate criminal justice measures