Transnational organized crime: from definition to instruments of counteraction
Keywords:
transnational organized crime, transnationality, principle of legal certainty (lex certa), conceptual model, cyber-enabled fraud, beneficial ownership, asset recovery, operational-search activity, countering organized crime.Abstract
Background. Transnational organized crime remains one of the most serious threats to international and national security, yet a single workable legal definition has not been achieved, while the digital transformation of criminal markets raises new questions for criminal-law scholarship.
Objective. To examine the definitional problem of transnational organized crime in its methodological, comparative-legal and regional dimensions and to locate the conceptual apparatus within the system
of counteraction tools.
Methods. Historical-legal, comparative-legal, formal-legal and systemic-structural methods, together with analysis of international instruments and UNODC and FATF materials.
Results. Transnational organized crime is substantiated as a species of organized crime related to it as species to genus. A two-tier conceptual model is proposed, distinguishing an invariant core of features, governed by the requirement of legal certainty, from a variable tier that determines the choice of countermeasures. On this basis the toolkit of counteraction is systematized by the features of the concept,
the limits of applicability of its individual groups are established, and a criterion of its effectiveness is formulated with regard to the Asia-Pacific region.
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