Neil Boister

Waltzing on the Vienna Consensus on Drug Control? Tensions in the International System for the Control of Drugs

This article examines the tensions within the international drug control system which are putting the until now consensual position in regard to the prohibition on drugs supply and use for anything other than medical and scientific use – the Vienna Consensus – under strain. The article examines a number of areas where policy stress is leading to controversy about potential violation of international drug control treaty obligations by states parties. Drawing a comparison with earlier periods of stress when drug control fell under the League of Nations, it suggests that what appears to be occurring is a shift in the Vienna consensus, and that the drug conventions are sufficiently flexible to permit resulting shifts in practice, although reform would be preferable.

Further reflections on the concept of transnational criminal law

In an attempt to clarify the concept of transnational criminal law, this piece examines its basic elements, analysing questions about what its essential components are and whether purely national crimes and laws for criminal cooperation are part of transnational criminal law. It then turns to the difficult question of whether transnational criminal law can accurately be termed a legal system, examining whether – and if so, how – apparently unrelated national criminal laws dealing with transnational crime are in a systemic relation. The piece then shifts its attention to whether it is possible to expand the transnational legal space to include rules that are made autonomously from state or international authority. After discussing whether transnational criminal law is a pluralist legal order, it concludes by examining who benefits from transnational criminal law, focusing on whether – and if so, how – transnational criminal law can escape the taint of Western hegemony.

The Cooperation Provisions of the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime: A ‘Toolbox’ Rarely Used?

This article examines the provisions for international cooperation in the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime ( UNTOC ) and their effectiveness in achieving the UNTOC ’s goal of promoting effective cooperation in the prevention and combating of transnational organised crime. It is a response to the growing sense that the UNTOC is not as effective a tool as promised, which sense is exacerbated by the absence of a functional review mechanism for the UNTOC . The article notes the delimitation of the scope of the UNTOC based on organised crime groups that participate in serious transnational crime. It then goes on to describe the UNTOC ’s provisions for informal law enforcement cooperation, mutual legal assistance, international cooperation in asset recovery and extradition, and examines what little evidence there is of the implementation of these provisions. It concludes that the UNTOC appears to be have been more successful as a tool for promoting informal rather than formal cooperation, and speculates as to why this may be so.

Global Trends towards the Simplification of Extradition Procedures From the Substantive to the Procedural without a Universal Framework of Reference

I recall having a conversation with Professor John Dugard in the early 1990s in which I mentioned that I was doing some work on extradition for my PhD thesis. It was a subject that interested him; I discovered that he was an active member of the International Law Association’s sub-committee on extradition and human rights, which led to his seminal article with Christine Van Den Wyngaert on reconciling human rights with extradition published in the American Journal of International Law.1 At the time I confess I shared neither his knowledge of nor enthusiasm for the law of extradition; but I have since come to realise that extradition occupies a fragile position in relations between States, one entailing a fine balance between effective law enforcement and respect for fundamental values. As Dugard and van den Wyngaert highlighted in their discussion, the former easily trumps the latter. Extradition describes the process of remitting or returning an individual from a State or country where they seek refuge to a State where they are wanted to either serve out an existing criminal sentence or to face criminal trial.2 It is the most important component of what is generically known as “international cooperation against crime,” which also entails other forms of legal assistance to States based on reciprocity. The goal of extradition is to suppress crime, and it is a shared goal among cooperating States. As La Forrest J put it in the Supreme Court of Canada in United States v. Cotroni the goal of extradition is to enable “peace and public order in all organized societies.”3 We cannot, however, ignore

Colonialism, Anti-Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism in China: The Opium Question at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

Partly a system of moral disapprobation, partly a system of trade prohibition, the foundations of the modern international drug control system arise from China’s opium problem of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The bizarre morality play that began with the opium wars where European states fought to preserve their opium trade to China reached its finale with the contest between Japan’s and the USA’s versions of drug control played out the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. This chapter explores the hypothesis that debates on the appropriate responses to opium at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East played a crucial role in ending one kind of imperialism—the British/European enforced supply of opium into China—and introducing another—the US-buttressed moral-hegemonic enforced suppression of opium. The tribunal provided a venue to the USA for achieving hegemony over the global drug system by condemning Japanese behaviour and ratifying the US policy of prohibition. The chapter uses the Tokyo Trial as a space to interrogate these transitions. It traces the perspectives of the three main players—the colonizer, Japan—the colonized, China—and the neo-colonizer, the USA, through the evidence tendered about drug control at the trial. The paper examines to what extent the main normative tool at the trial—the rapidly weakening crime against peace—succeeded in providing an avenue for the normative buttressing of international drug prohibition in the post-Second World War period.