Name: Committee on Foreign Affairs Ordinary meeting
Uploaded: 2026-04-15T14:30:00+00:00

Committee on Foreign Affairs Ordinary meeting

15 April 2026

Contents updated on 15 Apr 2026

The expert outlines the study’s aims—tracking how organized criminal groups (OCGs) have become geopolitical actors, assessing global impacts, and testing if international law can hold them accountable—before presenting core findings that current legal and policy responses rely on outdated concepts of organized crime.

00:00 - 00:54

Speaker 1

Was to identify how organized criminal groups have evolved into geopolitical actors. The second was to chart the impact that this has had globally, basically across the last couple of decades, and finally, to evaluate the suitability of international law to hold these groups to account for those new behaviors. The central thesis of the study presented three key recommendations and three key findings. On the findings, the research outlines that contemporary societal developments have accelerated organized criminal groups' development into geopolitical actors with geopolitical impacts. The speed of this development, and I'll describe this later, has not been matched by legal policy and enforcement responses, which broadly continue to rely on outdated conceptions of what constitutes an organized criminal group and what constitutes organized crime.

00:56 - 01:40

Speaker 2

While the EU contains many useful tools for combating organized crime in this way, the responses require closer integration and a more forward-looking approach. Many of the findings in the research reflect trends that have existed for a long time. Organized criminal groups have always exploited state power vacuums, representing both the symptom and driver of declining governance. Those exploitation mechanisms are familiar to all of us and will involve corruption, weak governance, and common themes that we've seen for decades. However, a few recent key developments have accelerated those trends and the evolution of these groups in their geopolitical domain.

01:41 - 08:42

Speaker 1

First, technological innovation has expanded the geographic footprint of these groups, allowing them to proliferate their activities beyond territorial borders. Second, the parallel increase in liberalized trade, fluid global financing mechanisms has meant it is much easier for people to do business cross-border. In this environment, people who trade and smuggle, be that licit or illicit, are pioneering globalization. The report traces the evolution of these groups over the last few decades and suggests that the behaviors can be grouped into three distinct categories, all of which contain a few common themes. The first overriding thought is that these groups are strategic and not parasitic.

That is to say they not only act reactively and opportunistically to gaps, but proactively seek to create those gaps within our societies. Further, in all of the cases that I'm about to discuss, organized crime thrives alongside and within the legitimate business environment. It is not to be annexed from the state or the legal business. With that being said, we framed the evolution of these groups into giblet gibletical actors into three categories. The first are groups which we deemed opposed to the state.

These were large-scale powerful groups with enough power to contest traditional government. We perhaps most commonly think about these in Latin America, the Sinaloa Cartel, and other significant drug trafficking organizations which have expanded their footprint and now are able to control territory, transport corridors, as well as influence policy. We've seen attacks on officials in recent years, and the majority of efforts to combat these groups have overwhelmingly focused on the punitive disruption of drug trafficking. This includes recent efforts by countries to designate OCGs as terror groups to justify extraterritorial action and, in some cases, military intervention. In all cases, these approaches fail to recognize the entrenched nature of organized crime in communities and in state infrastructure.

The second category of group identified in the study are those groups that are embedded within the state. These groups seek not to combat the state and rival its power, but instead to exploit gaps to their advantage. In many ways, this is the traditional mafia method deployed by individuals, medium-sized, and large-scale groups alike to exploit gaps in governance structures. Identified efforts to combat this type of infiltration typically face significant challenge due to the protections that are by default afforded to states in international law and to private corporations, as well as the often overlooked symbiotic relationship between illicit and illicit economies. And the final category of group identified during the study are those groups that are sponsored directly by the state.

These are groups weaponized as proxies in modern warfare. Here, we present examples of organized crime groups being leveraged to deliver cyberattacks, misinformation campaigns, and provide money laundering services among other functions on behalf of the state. In response, states are hamstrung by a few key factors. Foundationally, the tenets of international law, including the widely accepted definition of organized crime group enshrined in the UN Convention on International Organized Crime or the UNTOC, overly focus on the structure of these groups and their financial incentives. International law is also predicated on the interaction between states.

In practice, this is a significant limiting factor because it simultaneously forces us to assume that OCGs are distinct from the state as subjects of the law, and risks empowering malign state actors with the tools to facilitate crime and eliminate competition. Finally, international law is fundamentally limited by its roots in political power. The lawmaking process is influenced by state power, and given organized crime is not listed as a core international crime under international humanitarian law, efforts to respond to transnational crime are overwhelmingly national. In the context of the EU, the response is simultaneously comprehensive as well as lacking in integration. While the global strategy from 2016 and the strategic compass from 2022 recognize the changing DNA of organized crime, this is not always manifested in practice.

For example, while the EU strategy to tackle organized crime encourages high-level disruption and other enforcement tactics, these overwhelmingly assume that organized crime sits outside of state functions. Some of the EU's most effective counter-organized crime tools face similar hurdles. Financial disruption, cross-border law enforcement, and mutual legal assistance efforts are weakened by the absence of a structural mechanism to standardize diplomatic approaches to combating organized crime. Further, and at a more granular level, a lack of guidance on data sharing and protection with external partners limits the depth of engagement on key issues. Under the CFSP and the CSDP, great coordination occurs to enable the imposition of sanctions, for example, to strengthen multilateral partnerships.

But the targets of these interventions remain criminal networks caught committing crimes. They do not provide an avenue to combat groups that destabilize regions, enable hostile actors, and undermine governance. As a result, the report concludes by presenting a series of recommendations to the European Parliament, which will be displayed on screen shortly. Broadly, these recommendations seek to establish a more robust framework of laws for defining the breadth of organized crime and ensuring that there is a legislative base for more efficient and effective cross-border cooperation. The current definitions are overly reliant on structure, financial benefit, and fail to capture the more clandestine activities of these groups that are carried out on a strategic level.

Ask anything about this video — I analyse its transcript to answer.