Scenario: The 2025 Retrospectives Combating Transnational Crime gathering is being convened to share best practice approaches to investigating and responding to transnational crime. It is focused on...

2025 Retrospective        4
2025 RETROSPECTIVE
Table of Contents
Introduction    3
Post Covid Crime Situation    3
National Security    4
Key changes in Strategy    6
Noticed Changes in the Last 5 Years    8
Policy Implications    8
Recommendations    11
Conclusion    12
References    14
Introduction
As the financial system has globalised over the last five years, so has its illicit equivalent. Transnational crime's worldwide impact has reached unparalleled heights. Criminal gangs have evolved horizontal network structures that really are hard to track down and stop, and they have broadened their activities. As a result, transnational crime has reached unprecedented proportions. Transnational crime (TNC) is a rich and rising business, with criminal operations in the region earning tens of billions of dollars per year for organised crime groups. Election systems are harmed, security is weakened, communities are harmed, economic development is stifled, and good governance is hampered by these offences. As a direct consequence of shifting social hierarchies, large-scale advancement, enhanced Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) connectivity, highly porous borders, and uneven regional cooperation, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam (the Mekong Countries) and neighbouring southern China are experiencing significant TNC changes.
Post Covid Crime Situation
Australia's COVID-19 Development Response, issued in May 2019, reshapes the country's development activities to support the Indo-health Pacific's security, economic recovery, and stability. It selects Southeast Asia as a priority region, recognising that our influence, interests, and capabilities are concentrated in our close vicinity. Partnerships for Recovery commits Australia to invest in partner nation attempts to improve administration of justice as part of its stabilization component. The Program is closely linked with Australia's COVID-19 response goals, given the potential for economic downturn and hardship in Mekong nations to exacerbate instability and provide fertile habitat for illicit, criminal, and terrorist networks, such as TNC (RAZAN, 2021). Combating transnational criminal and trafficking networks necessitates a multifaceted approach that protects citizens, undermines the financial strength of criminal and terrorist networks, disrupts illicit trafficking networks, defeats transnational criminal organisations, combats government corruption, strengthens the rule of law, strengthens judicial systems, and improves transparency. While these are significant obstacles, Australia's government will be able to design and implement a coordinated plan with other countries facing similar dangers.
National Security
TNC affects Australia's interests, regional stability, and economic growth, according to the 2024 Foreign Policy Paper. In the Paper, Australia pledges to engage more effectively with Southeast Asian partners to address TSOC, particularly via humanitarian assistance to strengthen capacity across the legal and judicial sectors (Foreign Policy White Paper, 2017). The regional security agenda is becoming more coherent, but it might ‘falter if there are perceived challenges to sovereignty' that impede information exchange and coordinated action on transnational issues. A push for more capacity to shape national security agendas, combating pervasive noncommunicable diseases and weak health systems, mitigating climate and resource security issues, and combating growing cyber and transnational crime threats are among the security priorities that have emerged from regional consultations across the region (McKinley et al., 2021). Transnational crime is a serious and rising security concern for most PICs. According to Danielle Watson and colleagues, police in PICs are severely limited in their ability to respond to transnational and organised crime, which is characterised by complex and multi-layered networks. The study claims that "these networks are mobile, well-resourced, and strategically coordinated, allowing them to operate across porous boundaries." She agrees that there is little evidence to assess the scale of international crime, but she singles out environmental crimes like illegal fishing and resource exploitation, sexual exploitation, and the trade of illegal drugs and chemical products as areas of special concern. A more "comprehensive, integrated, and coordinated strategy to countering transnational criminal threats" was advocated for in the Honiara Declaration on Law Enforcement Cooperation in 1992.
Cooperation among PICs would assist to build more robust collaborative and independent measures to combat transnational crime and cross-border threats, according to an Australian assessment on transnational organised crime in the Pacific published in 2024. It's been proven in recent research that when law enforcement agencies collaborate across jurisdictions, progress may be made. For example, recent successful drug seizures were made in Tonga and the French Pacific, as well as by the Asia-Pacific Group on Money Laundering. Undoubtedly, Australia has its own long-term success story of breaking down the criminal organisations (Matera & Murray, 2021). To combat transnational organised crime and related risks to national security, this approach is built around a single unifying principle: develop, balance, and integrate the means of Australian power to combat transnational organised crime. Accordingly, the strategy outlines 56 priority measures, starting with those the United States can take within its own borders to minimise the effect of transnational crime both domestically and abroad. As well as improving our intelligence, protecting the financial system and strategic markets, increasing interdiction and investigation capabilities and prosecuting offenders as well as dismantling transnational threats such as the drug trade, we are also working to improve international cooperation (Fawcett, 2021).
Key changes in Strategy
In the year 2025, a number of strategic effects have been realised. Following four major policy changes, the 2024 Strategic Plan has been working towards this end-state in 2025:
1. In the first place, we must protect Australians and our allies from international criminal networks.
2. Aid partner nations in enhancing governance and transparency, dismantling the corrupting effect of...