5.3.4 Legal Issues which Cross National Boundaries
There are legal issues which cross national boundaries, creating problems for law-enforcement, contract disputes and redress for grievances.
National boundaries are impediments to effective law-enforcement. Although Interpol allows police forces to collaborate, and pool their information, criminals can sometimes move between countries without being traced.
Criminals can commit crimes over the Internet. The victim and some of the evidence might be in one country, while the criminal might be anywhere in the world.
● The UN has reported that North Korea financing weapons program with cybercrime, for example: “United Nations investigators say North Korea has stolen billions of dollars in cyberattacks to fund the regime’s weapons of mass destruction. The U.N. found 58 suspected North Korean cyberattacks between 2017 and 2023, valued at about $3 billion”.
● Cybercrime against individuals is a rapidly-growing problem, as identified in an FBI Internet Crime Report for example: “In 2023, the IC3 received a record number of complaints from the American public: 880,418 complaints with potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion, which is nearly a 10% increase in complaints and a 22% increase in losses compared to 2022.”
If a country wants a suspect to be transferred from another country, to stand trial in the jurisdiction under which the offence was committed, the two countries need to have bilateral extradition agreements. There are so many countries in the world that it would be very difficult to have bilateral extradition agreements between each and every one, so criminals can exploit the gaps in the existing network of treaties to try to escape justice – as illustrated in the BBC report, Ronnie Biggs: Who was the real Biggs?, which described how the famous British train robber escaped to Brazil in order to escape British justice.
Contracts between people and organisations in different countries currently have to be written in the law of one of the countries involved, so that suitable enforcement, jurisdiction and penalties can be available. The need to negotiate different contract terms across different countries adds to the cost of doing business, particularly for small and medium-sized companies, though some European and international guidelines are becoming available – as described on the LSE course, International Commercial Contracts: General Principles.
There is no adequate legal framework for redressing individual grievances between people in different countries. To illustrate this point, it is worth comparing compensation claims for two huge industrial pollution disasters: it was possible for America to get substantial compensation from BP very quickly for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, but it took 17 years for the inhabitants of Bhopal to get any compensation from Union Carbide for the 15,000 deaths caused by cyanide gas in 1984 – and the amount of that compensation was still being challenged more than 25 years after the accident, as reported by Joan Smith: What about compensation for Bhopal?.
The number of transactions between countries continues to increase, so there are correspondingly more legal issues which cross national boundaries. The increasing need for co-operation is beginning to be addressed:
● Co-operation in law enforcement is increasing (particularly in exchange of information on terrorist activity).
● Higher-level courts are being set up and are expanding their scope.
● Supra-national legislation is being agreed.
● Countries are harmonising their legislation to conform to higher-level agreements.
As described below, these measures are being taken for groups of countries (5.3.5) and globally (5.3.6).
This page is intended to form part of Edition 4 of the Patterns of Power series of books. An archived copy of it is held at https://www.patternsofpower.org/edition04/534a.htm.