Organized Crime

The face of organized crime is continually changing, yet its foundation has remained the same over many years. One of the distinguishing features of organized crime is in the challenge to clearly define it, which impacts on the implementation of transnational prevention and control policies. Although organized crime is as much disorganized as it is organized, it does feature specific characteristics. In order to understand organized crime, it must be viewed as a social process and a community social institution. Organized crime is, in its nature, highly adaptable to opportunities that major incidents, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, bring. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Shifts in the Trend and Nature of Migration in the Ethiopia-South Africa Migration Corridor

Over the past 25 years a significant (but unknown) number of migrants from Ethiopia have been migrating to South Africa through the "southern route.” This male-dominated migration is becoming more and more irregular and includes multiple transit countries, largely controlled by human smugglers. The size of the Ethiopian immigrant population in South Africa has increased. The profile of individuals on the move has also changed in terms of migrants' age, ethnicity, place of origin, gender and socioeconomic status. Youth from rural areas have joined the migration trail, and, increasingly, women are migrating for marriage in South Africa. Today, migrants from southern Ethiopia (Hadiya and Kambata) dominate Ethiopian migration to South Africa. The age and socioeconomic status of the migrants have also changed where teenagers, college graduates and civil servants are entering the migration stream in recent years. Equally changing is the nature and operation of the smuggling and settlement processes. Like the broader field of migration studies in which source and destination countries receive the overwhelming focus, the multiple transit countries Ethiopians on the move to South Africa travel through, and the migration journeys themselves, have not received adequate research attention. The effects these journeys have on the settlement processes are also largely ignored. This article, therefore, explores these emerging patterns with a view to understanding the inequalities faced by Ethiopian migrants on their journey to South Africa and the factors behind it. With the intensification of border closures due to multiple factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine the shift in the nature and trend of smuggling and how it is reflected in inequalities experienced by Ethiopian migrants in South Africa.

Female Migrant Street Prostitution during COVID-19 in Milan. A Qualitative Study on How Sex Workers Coped with the Challenges of the Pandemic

The article presents the outcome of a qualitative study on female migrant sex workers involved in street prostitution during the first two waves of COVID-19 in Italy, by focusing on their responses to the challenges posed by the pandemic in terms of economic strain and health hazards. The study, carried out from January 2020 to January 2021, has focused on the street sex market, given that this sector was particularly affected by mobility restrictions adopted during the pandemic, and on the city of Milan since it is one of the main hubs of human trafficking in Europe and one of the main sex markets in Italy, as well as one of the Italian cities most heavily hit by COVID-19. According to the findings of the empirical research - based on interviews and participant observation -, migrant women's experiences in the sex market during the pandemic show two concomitant elements, one referring to agency and the other to exploitation. This outcome has led us to put forward a third balanced theoretical perspective, between the two views polarizing the debate on sex trafficking - namely the "victimization approach" and the "critical approach" - that is grounded on the conceptual tool "layers of vulnerability" discussed in the bioethics debate.

Reflections on the Scottish experiences of recovering after the pandemic

An interview with Wendy Sinclair-Gieben, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons for Scotland is presented. Sinclair-Gieben said that despite the predictions, there have been very few deaths in custody and a lot of that is due to a really robust approach to managing the virus transmission risk. It's quite impressive and has been a huge challenge. Prisons across Scotland had many of their own staff going off as well, but they responded quickly. For example, the rapid introduction of in-cell telephony and virtual visits. There was a significant amount of communication to prisoners and staff to make sure they knew that what was happening to them, that was not dissimilar to the community. One of the real benefits of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the rapid introduction of digitalization across justice. Despite these positive changes, there were inevitably glitches in the delivery of new technologies. There was a whole rumour that the mobile phones could be adapted for criminal use by the smuggling in of SIM cards.

Rapid On-Site Detection of Illicit Drugs in Smuggled Samples with a Portable Electrochemical Device

The smuggling of illicit drugs urges the development of new tools for rapid on-site identification in cargos. Current methods rely on presumptive color tests and portable spectroscopic techniques. However, these methods sometimes exhibit inaccurate results due to commonly used cutting agents, the colorful nature of the sample or because the drugs are smuggled in common goods. Interestingly, electrochemical sensors can deal with these specific problems. Herein, an electrochemical device is presented that uses affordable screen-printed electrodes for the electrochemical profiling of several illicit drugs by square-wave voltammetry (SWV). The identification of the illicit compound is based on the oxidation potential of the analyte. Hence, a library of electrochemical profiles is built upon the analysis of illicit drugs and common cutting agents. This library allows the design of a tailor-made script that enables the identification of each drug through a user-friendly interface (laptop or mobile phone). Importantly, the electrochemical test is compared by analyzing 48 confiscated samples with other portable devices based on Raman and FTIR spectroscopy as well as a laboratory standard method (i.e., gas chromatography–mass spectrometry). Overall, the electrochemical results, obtained through the analysis of different samples from confiscated cargos at an end-user site, present a promising alternative to current methods, offering low-cost and rapid testing in the field.

SPECIFIC ISSUES FACED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION. THE FIGHT AGAINST SERIOUS AND ORGANIZED CRIME

In the pandemic context generated by the epidemiological situation we face, crime has increased worldwide, criminals adapting to the environmental changes in which they operate. Thus, online criminal activities have become more widespread, especially in the area of fraud, and concrete and structured action is needed at EU level to combat all forms of organized crime. Modern technology is an essential tool in terms of serious and organized crime, facilitating systematic cooperation between criminals, in achieving the common goal, respectively the achievement of profit. Thus, it becomes much easier to access illegal tools and goods, the economic crisis generated by the pandemic giving a safe lever in this regard. The European Union is working to establish the tools and measures to be developed in the period 2020-2025, to ensure security in the physical and digital environment.

You can smuggle but you can't hide: Sanction evasion during the Ukraine crisis: Zeitschrift für internationale Wirtshaftsbeziehungen

Whether one focuses on the rise of protectionism since the financial crisis of 2008, the active tariff policy introduced by the Trump administration, or China's recent trade restrictions on Australia for pushing for an independent investigation over the Covid-19 outbreak, trade measures have increasingly become an instrument of foreign and industrial policy rather than a multilateral effort to facilitate trade on a level playing field. [...]when the United States introduced punitive tariffs on China in 2018, U.S. Customs and Border Protection saw a nearly 50% rise in customs rulings related to the misclassification of goods, as firms tried to exploit the fact that early tariff rounds spared products similar to theirs.2 Similarly, when Russia introduced counter-sanctions on Western agricultural products in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, Russian newspapers reported on Belarusian seafood and tropical fruits appearing in local supermarkets, in clear cases of country-oforigin certificates being mislabeled to evade the import sanctions imposed on products from the European Union (Yeliseyeu, 2017). The incentives to evade trade barriers are particularly high for political sanctions, as they aim - in the form of goods sanctions - to economically impact the target economy and key decision makers by minimizing trade flows (Eaton and Engers, 1992;Kaempfer and Lowenberg, 1988), as opposed to import tariffs, which are mainly intended to extract rent and to support the implementing jurisdiction's industry. [...]a large string of the sanction literature addresses their effectiveness in the context of their (lack of) enforceability (Caruso, 2003;McLean and Whang, 2010;van Bergeijk and Biersteker, 2015). [...]I identify five different channels of sanction evasion and empirically analyze four of them, thus consolidating the various concepts of smuggling and evasion recorded in the literature.