U.N. AIDE WANTS WEB DRUG CRIME PURSUED LIKE GENOCIDE

UNITED NATIONS -- A U.N. official said Thursday he wanted to crack down on
use of the Internet in trading illegal drugs by classifying such dealings
via the World Wide Web as a universal crime like genocide or war crimes.
Pino Arlacchi, head of the Vienna-based United Nations Office for Drug
Control and Crime Prevention, said his office was exploring giving so-called
"universal jurisdiction" to Internet crimes because wrongdoing in cyberspace
so easily evades traditional national jurisdictional lines.

Currently, only genocide and crimes against humanity enjoy universal
jurisdiction, meaning they can be pursued internationally.

In the illegal drugs market, the Internet "is more and more important in
providing exchanges of information, in expanding the market, particularly
the final market, and we are very worried about it," Arlacchi told a news
briefing.

Due to the global nature of drug crimes, "it is extremely difficult to route
a case into a precise jurisdiction. So we believe that this problem is
encouraging us to go in the direction of universal jurisdiction," he said.

Arlacchi said the concept would be explored in depth at a U.N. symposium in
Palermo, Italy, at the end of this year. The symposium will mark the signing
of an international convention on organized crime to be approved next month
in Vienna.

The U.N. official said use of the Internet in the actual trafficking of
illegal drugs remained "very small -- it is minimal."

But the Internet offers increasing amounts of information promoting illicit
drug use and telling people how to make illegal substances and where to find
them, he said.

The Internet provides "a lot of extremely dangerous information," he said.
"You can enter a completely different world where the issue is treated in
the opposite view as it should be."

"And unfortunately, these views are spreading and we are now thinking about
some instrument to at least stop the expansion of this flow of information,"
he said.

Arlacchi said international treaties left open the possibility of expanding
the concept of universal jurisdiction to crimes beyond genocide and crimes
against humanity.

"Internet crime and money laundering, for instance, are two very important
aspects of modern criminal activities that cannot be easily chased and
challenged through the conventional traditional instruments, that are all
based on national jurisdiction," he said.