What is the primary focus of The Borderlands of Criminal Law II conference?

The conference primarily focuses on the evolving intersections of criminal law with other legal and societal domains, exploring the challenges and complexities arising from this expansion in Saarbrücken, DEU.

Where is the conference being held?

The conference is being held in the city of Saarbrücken, DEU.

The Borderlands of Criminal Law II

Name: The Borderlands of Criminal Law II
Start: 2027-05-24T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-05-25T00:00:00Z
Location: Saarbrücken

May 24–25, 2027Saarbrücken, GermanyIn-person

Registration open

The Borderlands of Criminal Law II conference, held in Saarbrücken, DEU, serves as a critical forum for exploring the evolving intersections of criminal law with other legal and societal domains. This event brings together legal scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to dissect the complexities arising from the expansion of criminal law into areas traditionally governed by different legal frameworks. The discussions aim to foster a deeper understanding of how these 'borderlands' challenge established legal principles and demand innovative solutions.

Committees & topics

Topics
Combating Transnational Organised Crime · International Responses to Terrorism · Cybercrime and the Governance of the Digital Underworld · International Drug Trafficking and Control · Trafficking in Cultural Property · Trafficking in Endangered Species · Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking · Combating Money Laundering and Illicit Finance

Why it matters

The increasing reach of criminal law into new territories, from economic regulation to environmental protection, presents significant challenges to legal systems globally. This phenomenon necessitates a careful examination of jurisdictional boundaries, the harmonization of diverse legal traditions, and the potential for over-criminalization. The conference provides a vital platform for addressing these issues, offering insights into how different countries are grappling with the expansion of criminal law and its implications for individual rights and state sovereignty.

Understanding these borderlands is crucial for effective international cooperation in combating complex crimes. As criminal activities increasingly transcend national borders, the need for coherent and adaptable legal frameworks becomes paramount. This event contributes to the ongoing dialogue on how to balance national legal specificities with the imperative for global coordination in areas such as cybercrime and transnational organized crime. The insights generated here can inform policy development and legal reforms aimed at creating more robust and equitable justice systems.

How to prepare

Participants preparing for this conference should focus on the theoretical and practical challenges posed by the expansion of criminal law. A thorough review of comparative criminal law approaches, particularly concerning the interaction between national and international legal norms, would be highly beneficial. Consider how different legal traditions, such as those found in DEU, approach the categorization and prosecution of offenses that blur traditional legal lines.

Familiarity with key international legal instruments and their application in national contexts will be advantageous. Delegates should also be prepared to discuss specific case studies or legislative developments from their respective jurisdictions that illustrate the complexities of criminal law's borderlands. Engaging with the concept of Gender Dynamics Across Cultures within legal frameworks can also provide a nuanced perspective on how criminal law impacts diverse populations.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Germany

As the host nation, DEU has a significant interest in the discussions, given its robust legal framework and active participation in European and international legal cooperation.

Role in topic

DEU's legal system, with its emphasis on codified law and a strong tradition of legal scholarship, provides a rich context for examining the theoretical and practical implications of criminal law's expansion. Its role in the European Union also places it at the forefront of efforts to harmonize criminal law across member states.

United States

The USA, with its common law tradition and extensive experience in combating transnational crime, offers valuable perspectives on jurisdictional challenges and enforcement mechanisms.

Role in topic

The USA's approach to criminal law, particularly in areas like cybercrime and financial offenses, often involves broad extraterritorial application, leading to complex jurisdictional questions that are central to the 'borderlands' discourse.

China

CHN's evolving legal system and its engagement with international legal norms present a unique perspective on how a rapidly developing economy addresses the challenges of criminal law in new domains.

Role in topic

CHN's increasing global economic presence and its efforts to combat corruption and economic crimes, while maintaining its sovereign legal principles, offer important case studies for understanding the interface between national and international criminal law.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Combating Transnational Organised Crime

Transnational organised crime emerged as a defined international concern in the post–Cold War era, when the loosening of borders, expansion of global trade, and collapse of state authority in parts of Eurasia allowed criminal networks to operate across jurisdictions with unprecedented speed. Italian mafia structures, Japanese yakuza, Chinese triads, Latin American cartels, and post-Soviet syndicates served as early templates, but contemporary networks are typically more fluid, project-based, and reliant on professional facilitators in law, finance, and logistics. The UN's 2000 Palermo Convention (UNTOC) and its protocols on trafficking in persons, smuggling of migrants, and firearms became the principal multilateral framework, supplemented by UNODC's role as coordinator and the work of INTERPOL and regional bodies such as Europol and ASEANAPOL. The core dispute today is less about whether to cooperate than about how. States differ on the scope of mutual legal assistance, the admissibility of evidence gathered abroad, asset recovery and repatriation, and the extraterritorial reach of national prosecutions. Sanctuary jurisdictions, weak rule-of-law states, and the fusion of criminal and political elites in some regions complicate enforcement, while encrypted communications and cryptocurrency have eroded traditional choke points. Recent attention has focused on convergence between organised crime and armed groups in the Sahel, the Andes, Myanmar's border regions, and Mexico, raising questions about whether criminal governance now rivals state authority in parts of the world.

Key players

International Responses to Terrorism

Modern counter-terrorism law evolved through a patchwork of sectoral treaties from the 1960s onward — covering aircraft hijacking, hostage-taking, bombings, and terrorist financing — rather than a single global convention, because states have never agreed on a legal definition of terrorism. The September 11, 2001 attacks transformed the field: Security Council Resolution 1373 imposed binding obligations on all states to criminalise terrorist financing, freeze assets, and tighten border controls, and created the Counter-Terrorism Committee. The subsequent rise and territorial defeat of ISIL between 2014 and 2019 produced further obligations on foreign terrorist fighters (Resolution 2178) and prosecution, rehabilitation, and reintegration of returnees. The central legal dispute remains the definitional question — particularly the carve-out claimed by some states for national liberation movements — which has blocked the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism since 1996. Operationally, debates concentrate on the human-rights costs of sweeping counter-terrorism laws, the use of administrative detention and sanctions lists without judicial review, the treatment of detainees in north-east Syria, and the lawful limits of extraterritorial force, including drone strikes. Threat patterns have also shifted: jihadist insurgencies are most acute in the Sahel and parts of Africa, while many Western states report rising violence from racially and ethnically motivated extremists, raising questions about whether existing legal categories are fit for purpose.

Key players

Cybercrime and the Governance of the Digital Underworld

Cybercrime moved from a fringe concern in the 1990s to a top-tier transnational threat as economies digitised and ransomware, business email compromise, and large-scale data theft became industrial operations. The Council of Europe's 2001 Budapest Convention was the first binding international instrument, harmonising offences such as illegal access, data interference, and computer-related fraud, and creating fast-track cross-border cooperation procedures. It has been ratified by more than seventy states but has been rejected by Russia, China, and others who view it as Western-drafted and insufficiently respectful of sovereignty over data and networks. That split drove the negotiation, at Russia's initiative, of a new UN Convention against Cybercrime, adopted by the General Assembly in 2024 after contentious talks over scope, human rights safeguards, and the breadth of evidence-sharing obligations. Civil society and many democracies warned that broad offences and intrusive cooperation tools could be used to target journalists, dissidents, and security researchers. Operationally, attention is focused on ransomware ecosystems hosted in permissive jurisdictions, state-tolerated or state-linked intrusion groups, cryptocurrency-enabled laundering, and the question of how mutual legal assistance can keep pace with evidence that is volatile, encrypted, and stored in the cloud across multiple jurisdictions.

Key players

International Drug Trafficking and Control

The international drug control regime rests on three UN conventions — 1961, 1971, and 1988 — which together schedule controlled substances, criminalise trafficking, and require states to cooperate on extradition, controlled deliveries, and precursor chemicals. Implementation is overseen by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the International Narcotics Control Board, and UNODC. For decades the regime was dominated by a prohibitionist 'war on drugs' paradigm, championed especially by the United States, focused on supply-side eradication in producer states such as Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan, and Myanmar. That consensus has eroded. The 2016 UNGASS on drugs acknowledged proportionality, public health, and human rights as core principles; Uruguay, Canada, and many US states have legalised cannabis in tension with the treaties; and Latin American leaders have openly questioned the costs of militarised supply-side strategies. Two developments dominate current debate: the synthetic opioid crisis, driven by fentanyl precursors largely produced in China and trafficked through Mexico, which has killed hundreds of thousands in North America; and the collapse of Afghan opium production after the Taliban's 2022 ban, which has reshaped global heroin flows and raised questions about substitution by synthetics. Cocaine production, meanwhile, is at record highs, and trafficking through West Africa and European ports such as Antwerp and Rotterdam has fuelled new waves of organised-crime violence.

Key players

Trafficking in Cultural Property

The illicit trade in cultural property — looted antiquities, stolen artworks, and objects removed during colonial rule or armed conflict — sits at the intersection of organised crime, heritage protection, and contested histories. The 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of cultural property in armed conflict, the 1970 UNESCO Convention on illicit import and export, and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on stolen or illegally exported objects form the core legal framework, supplemented by EU regulations on import licensing and Security Council measures such as Resolution 2347 (2017), which condemned the destruction and trafficking of heritage by ISIL and other armed groups. Enforcement remains uneven. Source countries — including Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Peru, Cambodia, Mali, and Nigeria — argue that market states have done too little to police auction houses, dealers, and private collections, and that due-diligence standards are weak. Market states counter that provenance information is often unavailable and that retroactive application of modern norms creates legal uncertainty. Restitution has become a high-profile dimension, with returns from major Western museums of Benin Bronzes and other colonial-era objects accelerating since 2020. War in Ukraine and Syria, and looting in conflict zones from Yemen to Sudan, continue to feed an opaque market in which digital platforms have lowered barriers to entry for both sellers and buyers.

Key players

Trafficking in Endangered Species

Illegal wildlife trade is among the most lucrative transnational crimes, with conservative estimates placing its annual value in the range of seven to twenty-three billion US dollars. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), adopted in 1973 and now with more than 180 parties, governs lawful trade through a system of permits and appendices, but enforcement depends on national criminal law. UNODC, INTERPOL's Wildlife Crime Working Group, the World Customs Organization, and the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime have progressively framed wildlife trafficking as serious organised crime, and General Assembly resolutions since 2015 have called on states to treat it as a predicate offence for money-laundering purposes. Flows are dominated by rhino horn and elephant ivory from southern and eastern Africa to Asia, pangolin scales from Africa and Southeast Asia to China and Vietnam, big-cat parts, totoaba bladders from Mexico, and a vast trade in reptiles, birds, and timber such as rosewood. Demand-reduction campaigns in China and Vietnam, China's 2017 domestic ivory ban, and high-profile prosecutions have produced some gains, but corruption along trafficking routes, low conviction rates, and the diversion of capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic have limited progress. Climate change and habitat loss compound the pressure on species already targeted by traffickers.

Key players

Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking

Although chattel slavery was formally abolished across the world by the mid-twentieth century — building on the 1926 Slavery Convention and its 1956 Supplementary Convention — contemporary forms of slavery persist on a vast scale. The ILO and Walk Free estimate that around 50 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, including roughly 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. The legal architecture combines the prohibition of slavery as jus cogens, the 2000 UN Trafficking in Persons (Palermo) Protocol, ILO Conventions 29 and 105 and the 2014 Forced Labour Protocol, and a growing body of supply-chain due-diligence laws in the UK, France, Germany, Australia, and the EU. Current debates focus on three fronts. First, state-imposed forced labour, particularly allegations concerning Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, has triggered import bans such as the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and the EU's forced labour regulation. Second, labour exploitation in global supply chains — from Gulf construction and domestic work under the kafala system, to fishing fleets, electronics, and agriculture — raises questions about corporate liability and the limits of voluntary standards. Third, sexual exploitation and the trafficking of women, children, and migrants along routes from West Africa to Europe, within Southeast Asia, and across the Americas continues to evolve, with online recruitment and the use of debt bondage in 'pig-butchering' scam compounds in Southeast Asia representing newer patterns.

Key players

Combating Money Laundering and Illicit Finance

Anti-money-laundering (AML) emerged as a distinct legal field with the 1988 Vienna Convention on drug trafficking, which first required states to criminalise the laundering of drug proceeds. The 1989 creation of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) by the G7 produced the soft-law framework that now dominates the field: 40 Recommendations covering customer due diligence, beneficial ownership, suspicious-transaction reporting, and international cooperation, enforced through mutual evaluations and grey- and black-listing. The Palermo and Merida (UN Convention against Corruption, 2003) conventions expanded predicate offences to organised crime and corruption, and post-9/11 instruments added counter-terrorist financing. Despite this dense architecture, estimates suggest that less than one percent of illicit financial flows are seized. Key fault lines include beneficial-ownership transparency, where progress on public registers has stalled after a 2022 EU Court of Justice ruling; the misuse of shell companies, trusts, and real estate in jurisdictions such as the United States, United Kingdom, and the UAE; the AML treatment of virtual assets and decentralised finance; and the rapid expansion of sanctions-driven financial enforcement against Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which has blurred the line between AML and geopolitics. Developing states often argue that FATF standards impose heavy compliance costs and contribute to the de-risking of correspondent banking, cutting off entire regions from the global financial system.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for The Borderlands of Criminal Law II.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Ukraine Drone Strikes Crimea Power Grid

Pakistan-Linked Terror Network in Karnataka

Trump's Executive Order on Ibogaine

Trump's Order to Fast-Track Ibogaine Access

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Germany May 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

The Borderlands of Criminal Law II

May 24–25, 2027Saarbrücken, GermanyIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Combating Transnational Organised Crime · International Responses to Terrorism · Cybercrime and the Governance of the Digital Underworld · International Drug Trafficking and Control · Trafficking in Cultural Property · Trafficking in Endangered Species · Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking · Combating Money Laundering and Illicit Finance

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Germany

As the host nation, DEU has a significant interest in the discussions, given its robust legal framework and active participation in European and international legal cooperation.

Role in topic

United States

The USA, with its common law tradition and extensive experience in combating transnational crime, offers valuable perspectives on jurisdictional challenges and enforcement mechanisms.

Role in topic

China

CHN's evolving legal system and its engagement with international legal norms present a unique perspective on how a rapidly developing economy addresses the challenges of criminal law in new domains.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Combating Transnational Organised Crime

Key players

International Responses to Terrorism

Key players

Cybercrime and the Governance of the Digital Underworld

Key players

International Drug Trafficking and Control

Key players

Trafficking in Cultural Property

Key players

Trafficking in Endangered Species

Key players

Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking

Key players

Combating Money Laundering and Illicit Finance

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for The Borderlands of Criminal Law II.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Ukraine Drone Strikes Crimea Power Grid

Pakistan-Linked Terror Network in Karnataka

Trump's Executive Order on Ibogaine

Trump's Order to Fast-Track Ibogaine Access

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Germany May 2027

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

9th Munich Ukrainian Lunch – ‘Ukraine: Futures’ Frontline’

STATE OF SECURITY 2026

Annual Conference of the Critical Security Studies (CSS) Thematic Group

5th Kiel Security Conference

Tübingen International & European Studies Summer School August 2026 on Crisis and Identity

Tysklandseminar 2026

Frequently asked questions