Author: Amandine Scherrer
ISBN No: 9780 7546 7544
Review date: 14/12/2025
No of pages: 183
Publisher: Ashgate
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
The recent G8 summit in London made headlines for protests outside, which indirectly drew attention to the security around the event. An academic book stresses how the G8, quietly, secretively, seeks to act on drug trafficking, money laundering and other serious crime across national boundaries.
Briefly, ‘experts’ meet under the G8 umbrella to discuss how to co-operate. They’re called the Lyon Group, named after the venue for the 1996 summit. The name expert, however, may be misleading – these officials may not have expertise in crime-fighting. As the author, a French-Canadian, stresses organised crime – gambling and racketeering, threatening legitimate business – are nothing new, in the United States or elsewhere. Given the ad hoc groups set up by the Lyon Group – covering for instance organised credit card crime, trafficking in stolen vehicles, and corruption – you can wonder quite how much actual difference the group makes, as opposed to just holding meetings around the world three times a year and talking with bodies such as the United Nations, European Union and Interpol. Since 9-11, the work has shifted towards countering terrorism, such as tackling terrorist finance. As the author suggests, on the one hand there is the G8 summit politicians and their ‘experts’ wanting to act against criminals and terrorists, but what they propose – sharing of data, biometrics – may well not tally with each country’s law. The author ends: "As a confidential mechanism within the G8 system, the Lyon Group stands as proof that the G8 is a centrifugal force within which international norms and exceptional procedures that infringe the most basic rules of democracy are discussed and agreed, and one which operates in absolute opacity." But are these experts ever ahead of the criminals and terrorists, their high-tech methods and recruiting?
