Developing Criminal Intelligence Sharing Platforms to Address Transnational Organized Crimes

The world is getting more inter-connected due to the development of science and technology. The networks of transnational organized crimes have become more complicated and diversified in terms of its scope and methods, and the velocity of transformation in organized criminal groups has been accelerated in accordance with the new trend. As well known, many scholars and law enforcement professionals have pointed out that it is not easy to respond to organized crimes with an effort of a single state with limited jurisdiction. The global community has developed numerous measures to overcome this issue of response against transnational crimes through international cooperation and ‘criminal intelligence sharing’ has been identified as a core factor to decide the success or failure of the collaborative effort. Despite the reluctance of criminal intelligence cooperation as its intrinsic characteristic, the global community has achieved a notable progress in addressing transnational organized crimes under the principle of United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols as well as the collaborative efforts led by international, intergovernmental, and regional organizations such as United Nations, Interpol, Europol, and FATF. However, contrary to a high level of compromise to ‘the agreement to cooperate’ and ‘the principle of cooperation’, the matter of ‘how to cooperate’ has often been regarded as the second concern. In most of developing states, the current criminal intelligence sharing function between countries is rather fragmented and limited, which hinders the eradication of transnational criminal groups. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of criminal intelligence sharing but there has not been sufficient discourses regarding what kinds of intelligence to share and how to cooperate in detail. This article reviews the current international criminal intelligence sharing principles and practices including the agreement between Interpol and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to grant National Data Exchange (N-DEx) users access to Interpol records and an ongoing project named EVIDENCE2e-CODEX to share electronic evidence in European countries. It also analyzes the best practices and limitations of criminal intelligence sharing in the investigation of transnational crime organizations in Asian states including South Korea. Eventually, this article proposes to establish agile, preemptive and sustainable inter-state criminal intelligence sharing platforms to effectively address crimes across borders.