Foreword

• Author: Justice Elizabeth Bennett
• Profession: Court of Appeal for British Columbia Court of Appeal for Yukon Court Martial Court of Appeal of Canada Past-President of the International Society for the Reform of the Criminal Law
• Pages: 9-11

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Foreword

It is a privilege to write the foreword for this new collection of essays that

discusses some of the many issues arising in the complex area of trans-

national and cross-border criminal law — in particular, within the context

of Canadian criminal law. Professor Robert Currie, Canada’s foremost

expert in the eld, has gathered an inspired set of papers from a stellar

group of legal experts whose work touches crime that transcends borders.

In the book’s introductory opening chapter, Professor Currie draws an

important distinction between transnational criminal law and cross-bor-

der criminal law, although they are intertwined. Transnational criminal

law encapsulates the legal regime in which states, agreeing that particular

oences are of signicant mutual concern, create primarily treaty-based

mechanisms with which to cooperate with each other in suppressing those

crimes. Cross-border criminal law has more of a domestic avour; it is a

mixed bag of rules and tools that police, prosecutors, defence lawyers, and

the courts can (and should) use to deal with oences that involve a foreign

state in some way. e two areas are mutually reinforcing. Both have an

international law component, but are ultimately geared toward facilitating

the prosecution and defence of domestic crimes before domestic courts.

Professor Currie convincingly makes the case that the traditional practice

of calling all of this “international criminal law” obscures the dierences

between these bodies of law and that dealing with war crimes, genocide,

and the International Criminal Court, and that clarity is preferable to

obscurity given the nature of the subject matter.