Transnational Crime Without Transnational Prosecution

The enforcement of transnational criminal law is left almost exclusively to national authorities. Public prosecutors and investigating judges play a key role in this field. This generates a seemingly dichotomous situation in which national bodies are faced with crime that is inherently transnational of nature. Each judge and each public prosecutor is expected to serve in the first place its own national legal order, bound to respect the limits of its jurisdiction set by national law, ultimately serving adjudication before a national court. This article reflects on the role of judicial authorities in the fight against transnational crime. Through various treaty obligations they are expected to coordinate with each other, and are obliged to reasonably use the instruments of international cooperation at their disposal. Over the last decade, a small body of caselaw from the European Court of Human Rights has emerged, setting a standard on how judicial authorities should deal with certain types of cross-border crime. Notwithstanding those obligations, a handful of empirical studies indicate that there is a lot of room for improvement of the performance of our national judicial bodies in this field.