U.N. Aide Wants Web Drug Crime Pursued Like Genocide
By REUTERS
UNITED NATIONS -- A U.N. official said Thursday he wanted to crack down on use of the Internet in trading illegal drugs by classifying such dealings via the World Wide Web as a universal crime like genocide or war crimes.
Pino Arlacchi, head of the Vienna-based United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, said his office was exploring giving so-called "universal jurisdiction" to Internet crimes because wrongdoing in cyberspace so easily evades traditional national jurisdictional lines.
Currently, only genocide and crimes against humanity enjoy universal jurisdiction, meaning they can be pursued internationally.
In the illegal drugs market, the Internet "is more and more important in providing exchanges of information, in expanding the market, particularly the final market, and we are very worried about it," Arlacchi told a news briefing.
Due to the global nature of drug crimes, "it is extremely difficult to route a case into a precise jurisdiction. So we believe that this problem is encouraging us to go in the direction of universal jurisdiction," he said.
Arlacchi said the concept would be explored in depth at a U.N. symposium in Palermo, Italy, at the end of this year. The symposium will mark the signing of an international convention on organized crime to be approved next month in Vienna.
The U.N. official said use of the Internet in the actual trafficking of illegal drugs remained "very small -- it is minimal."
But the Internet offers increasing amounts of information promoting illicit drug use and telling people how to make illegal substances and where to find them, he said.
The Internet provides "a lot of extremely dangerous information," he said. "You can enter a completely different world where the issue is treated in the opposite view as it should be."
"And unfortunately, these views are spreading and we are now thinking about some instrument to at least stop the expansion of this flow of information," he said.
Arlacchi said international treaties left open the possibility of expanding the concept of universal jurisdiction to crimes beyond genocide and crimes against humanity.
"Internet crime and money laundering, for instance, are two very important aspects of modern criminal activities that cannot be easily chased and challenged through the conventional traditional instruments, that are all based on national jurisdiction," he said.
