Objectives of domestic and international criminal justice

The general objectives of international co-operation in criminal matters are in principle the same as those of domestic criminal justice. The primary purpose is to immobilize the criminal, which requires the tracing and arrest of the suspect as well as the gathering of evidence with a view to his prosecution. The fight against money laundering and the new, profit-oriented perspective of the fight against crime has given criminal justice a new important objective: the confiscation of the proceeds and instrumentalities from crime. These objectives not only govern the activities of law enforcement authorities in a domestic situation, but also in an international context.

International co-operation is sometimes indeed necessary to attain these goals given the transnational nature of the crime phenomenon, for example money laundering. From a strictly international law point of view, international co-operation is necessitated by the concept of sovereignty, which limits powers of a state to take investigatory, provisional and enforcement measures to its own territory (although this view merits to be attenuated from a common law viewpoint). It follows that, conceptually, international co-operation in criminal matters is mostly intended to deal with a lack of enforcement jurisdiction on the side of the requesting state. In the context of the international fight against money laundering, the lack of enforcement jurisdiction may take two forms. First, information required to prove the money laundering offence and/or the predicate offence will often be located on the territory of another state than the state which intends to prosecute the money laundering offence.