The UN has begun to incorporate a focus on organized crime in some of its peace operations work, primarily through the efforts by UN Police towards the capacity building of host state police. These are laudable, the author states in a discussion paper for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, but the UN and its partners must go further in developing a truly comprehensive and holistic approach to confronting the complex challenges to security and governance posed by organized crime within many conflict-affected host states—the effects of which often reach far beyond in a globalized world.
The UN requires a strategic framework on organized crime, and those missions with a mandate to counter organized crime require operational guidance, CAPARINI writes in the paper titled ‘UN Police and the Challenges of Organized Crime’. Much more is needed to develop a coherent, strategic and systematic approach to serious and organized crime and corruption that spans the security, development and human rights pillars, and that incorporates a preventive dimension. There must also be an effort to understand organized crime’s role through each phase of the conflict cycle, and to shape interventions to prevent its entrenchment in symbiotic relationships with corruption and feeding of new cycles of conflict.
There is, thus, a growing need for UN Security Council mandates to address organized crime, illicit economies and corruption. Lacking an explicit mandate to counter organized crime, mission leadership will be reluctant to engage in related activities, and donors and partners will be unlikely to fund them. A peacekeeping mission should be mandated to confront this issue from the beginning of the mission in an approach that counters organized crime from the earliest stage, not later when criminal groups have consolidated and possibly penetrated the state administration.
Further, a mandate to counter organized crime must necessarily address efforts at different stages along the chain of justice—investigation, evidence gathering and prosecution. Finally, such a mandate must be properly resourced in human and material terms, and, due to its sensitivity and implications for corruption, would require high-level political backing from the mission leadership and UN Headquarters.
Arriving at a more integrated approach should involve the UN’s Global Focal Point for Police, Justice and Corrections (a joint initiative of the UNDP and the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, since renamed Department of Peace Operations) since 2012 that has sought to coordinate system-wide UN rule-of-law responses to complex security and governance challenges), and greater attention to the drivers of such challenges would be an important step.
More widely, CAPARINI continues, a rethinking of internal security and its requirements in a time of growing challenges posed by organized crime is required by the UN and its member states. If it is recognized and accepted that the rule of law is integral to security, a Chapter VII mandate, usually applied in protection of civilian contexts, could be interpreted to include upholding the rule of law. That is, if organized crime and corruption are interpreted as posing a sufficient threat to the peace process, security and stability of a host country, Chapter VII’s ‘all necessary means’ could be invoked.
Measures necessary to combat organized crime in such cases, such as criminal intelligence gathering, investigations and prosecutions, and the existence of an independent justice system, would probably need to be specified in the mandate and operationalized by the mission until the host state capacities were sufficiently developed to take them over. “However, in the current international political environment, the application of a Chapter VII ‘all necessary means’ mandate is unlikely as UN peacekeeping missions are under pressure to downsize and restrict their mandated tasks.”
Each setting is unique and requires local contextual understanding in order to anticipate threats posed by organized crime, corruption and other complex drivers of violence, and to develop an appropriately tailored strategy. To this end, CAPARINI states, a political economy analysis of the economic drivers of conflict and its links to criminal networks and corruption should be undertaken as part of the preparation before a mission is deployed, and regularly updated to reflect changing dynamics among armed groups, criminal organizations and networks, and political elites and state officials.
Such analyses should examine the types of illicit economic activity that have thrived during the conflict and, by extension, who has most to lose from peace. Depending on the country and region, this will differ. But it is often overlooked, despite the importance of identifying potential spoilers in a peace process. A political economy analysis should not be oversimplified and should help understand the subjective and elusive drivers of violence such as ethnicity, religion, ideas and historical sense of grievance.
Addressing the political economy dimension as part of a broader conflict analysis may help to provide a better understanding of post-conflict violence and its drivers, and can feed into the drafting of more specific, contextually grounded guidance. Police and other law enforcement experts need to be integrated in assessments and analyses from the earliest stages of pre-mission planning.
Some UN observers feel that the police component continues to be perceived as a mostly technical part of a peace operation that mostly teaches host state counter-parts how to fight crime, CAPARINI notes. However, the police perspective can provide insights into how the political economy of crime operates in a given context, and how it impacts governance and the rule of law more broadly. UN police experts provide an understanding of what will be needed to support the development of resilient state institutions that can provide the host population with a basic minimum of security, safety and justice.
Analysis of criminal networks and the building of relationships with host state populations are essential to developing an accurate understanding of the local context and develop appropriate political strategies, CAPARINI states. It is important to investigate and address at an early stage which criminal activities (including illicit resource exploitation and trafficking) have political impacts—by providing revenues to armed groups, empowering a political patronage network, or changing a strategic power balance. Failure to do so risks misunderstanding the situation on the ground and the threats this poses to peace.
Efforts to counter organized crime and state corruption should be part of a mission leadership’s strategy and integrated into the political process. Efforts should be made to build capacity of the organizations responsible for investigating economic crime, as well as judges and corruption investigation commissions.
Mission leadership, particularly Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSGs), have the opportunity to put organized crime and corruption on the agenda and keep it in the eye of the public and civil society (including churches) and government. Special Representatives must also be made aware of dilemmas faced by other SRSGs in situations where organized crime groups have threatened political stability, and the long-terms effects of compromises or decisions taken.
“Addressing serious organized crime is more than a technocratic exercise, requiring a politically aware approach on several levels,” CAPARINI states, adding that such an approach must recognize that meeting people’s basic needs is necessary to build sustainable peace and development. Illicit economies offer sources of income to impoverished populations, and without providing alternative livelihoods, efforts to counter organized crime and suppress the illicit economy are likely to encounter local resistance that derails state- and peacebuilding efforts.
A longer-term politically aware perspective would assess the potential of serious and organized crime, if allowed to become entrenched, to siphon off states’ resources and foster corruption in key sectors and at the heart of the polity. The political will of local actors and elites to support efforts to counter organized crime must be assessed and monitored.
At a more operational level, CAPARINI writes, the development of effective community-oriented policing practices by host state police is also key in the effort to disrupt and dismantle organized crime networks. Community-oriented policing aims to develop relationships of trust between police and society and is, thus, a foundation for preventing crime, reducing recruitment to criminal gangs and collecting information. Capacity-building activities must be sustainable, that is, integrated into training curricula and courses, such as through training-of-trainers programmes.
Where possible, the UN and its partners should conduct joint training and capacity building of host nation police, financial investigators, border guards, prosecutors and the judiciary in countering organized crime, in order to promote coordination and cooperation among stakeholders.
Corruption and organized crime go hand-in-hand, with systematic bribery or corruption of officials in key public sector areas such as law enforcement, local government and the judiciary being a critical factor in the entrenchment of organized crime. Efforts to prevent and disrupt corruption and organized crime must be pursued in tandem. Anti-corruption efforts may need to be framed in ways that make them more politically acceptable, such as professionalization of the public service.
To better appreciate the impact of corruption and kleptocracy on the daily lives and dignity of ordinary people, those planning and implementing peace operations need to speak not only with political elites or government officials, but also with ordinary people, and listen to their views on public service delivery including policing, justice and governance, and their experiences with corruption among state actors, the author states.
Missions should engage not only with governments, but also with host state populations, including through civil society and other channels. Peace operations need to systematically mitigate risks of inadvertently facilitating corruption and kleptocracy.
Field missions as well as country teams, agencies, funds and programmes should compile their collective knowledge about individuals and organizations, companies and local contractors known to be involved in corruption through top-down payments in patronage–client flows, and also bottom-up flows in terms of gifts, kickbacks, money paid to superiors, and money paid in exchange for public service positions, access or public contracts.
Mission and UN leadership should avoid meeting with officials who are known to be corrupt and avoid dealing with firms owned by them or their supporters.
Unless peace operations and donors conduct due diligence for corruption within police and other state agencies of the host state, they risk inadvertently building the capacities of individuals colluding with organized crime to better evade or subvert law enforcement efforts. The expertise necessary to counter organized crime should, thus, be seen as a ‘dual-use good’ with potential to be misused where adequate anti-corruption safeguards are not in place, and particularly where the state is captured or is at risk of being captured by criminal elements.
Finally, law enforcement efforts in settings where peace operations are deployed have tended to focus on seizing the material goods involved in organized crime, rather than the money generated. In consequence, the enormous profits made on even a fraction of the goods involved enable criminal groups to continue their activities—for example, some 40 per cent of cocaine and heroin are seized globally between production and consumption, compared with less than 1 per cent of the money generated by drug trafficking. Within the European Union, an estimated 98.9 per cent of proceeds from crime remain in the hands of criminals, with only 2.2 per cent seized, and half of that (1.1 per cent, the equivalent of €1.2 billion) successfully confiscated annually.
Confiscation (or forfeiture) of cash, assets or property derived from criminal activity is increasingly considered a key means of disrupting organized criminal groups. Methods of doing this currently being developed within Europe, such as ‘cash teams’ involving police and other agencies that follow the spending of suspected criminals to gather evidence in preparation for prosecution, could be examined and adapted for implementation in host states.
Confiscation mechanisms face considerable challenges in complex conflict-affected settings such as Mali and the countries of the Sahel, where capacity building on asset recovery by actors such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has begun but is not yet regularly practised by states in the region.
Similarly, in Liberia, despite improved interagency coordination and the establishment in 2012 of the Financial Investigations Unit (the main body responsible for investigating illicit financial activities), by 2018 there had been no arrests, prosecutions or convictions for money laundering due to limited law enforcement capacities, inadequate resources for the financial intelligence unit, and judicial corruption.
“These examples argue for earlier and more systemic efforts to build host state capacities at every stage of the chain of justice”, CAPARINI states.
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