You might remember previous posts about the fishy way in which the UK government halted a corruption probe into an arms deal between BAe and the Saudis. Today, a UK-based pressure group on environmental and social justice, the Corner House research group, will go to the High Court to argue that that decision should be subjected to a judicial review.
They will cite two principal factors: first, that the decision breached the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, and second, that the government's contention that 'allowing the enquiry to proceed would jeopardise national security' was bogus.
When the UK decision resulting in the Serious Fraud Office abandoning its investigations, the US Dept of Justice launched a criminal inquiry into the case, to investigate BAe's compliance with US anti-corruption laws.
Whatever emerges from this long-running episode, it provides a very good study into the complexity of cross-border jurisdictional issues - and whatever one's view on the international arms trade, the broader picture is that there are many other spheres of life in which cross-border jurisdictional issues will arise, and need to be addressed much more effectively than they currently seem to be.
Think of the vast range of activities in which cross-border activity exploits the fact that law (and law enforcement) differs widely from country to country: protection of intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, media piracy, publication of obscene material, identity theft and identity fraud, money laundering, hacking, spam, propagation of viruses bots and trojans, bandwidth theft, censorship, suppression of free speech, invasion of privacy, and the list could go on and on.
I know I've cited it before, but Jeffrey Robinson's summary is hard to beat:
"As long as we persist with a C17th idea of the nation-state, a C18th
judiciary and C19th law enforcement, the C21st will belong to organised
crime".
The odd thing is to look at who, in this instance, appears to be fighting for things to stay that way.
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