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Abstract

In the last ten to fifteen years, organized crime has evolved into one of the main issues on the political agenda of national governments and international organisations all over the world. Nowadays, this phenomenon is widely regarded as a global issue, parallel to the issues of e.g., corruption and terrorism. It is, in other words, an astonishing example of worldwide agenda setting. And although the knowledge of organized crime problems is still quite limited and certainly not equally distributed over the globe, at different geographical and political levels - national, regional, continental and intercontinental - all sorts of policy measures have been taken in order to contain them.

The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime 2000, is certainly the most important comprehensive initiative in this field. This is the reason why the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law and the Tilburg University School of Law took the initiative for an international conference in 2001, on a number of important aspects of this convention: its back-ground and purposes, substantive and procedural issues, implementation mechanisms and last but not least the shifting bounderies between criminal policy, foreign affairs and economic development. This book contains the proceedings of the conference that took place at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg im Breisgau.