Regional Security in Mercosur: Treaties and Cooperation Mechanisms to Combat Transnational Crime

Treaties and Cooperation Mechanisms to Combat Transnational Crime

Abstract

Considering the rising wave of criminality in their territories, the Mercosur nations, saw the need to develop specific cooperation mechanisms to combat it. Thereby, Mercosur members began to develop instruments, such as international conventions and agreements signed multilaterally and bilaterally, in order to promote more effective police cooperation to combat transnational organized crime, especially with regard to drug trafficking, weapons and smuggling. In this perspective, we use the hypothetical-deductive and historical-comparative method to develop the research and, thus, we seek to analyze the applicability of the agreements on regional security and police cooperation elaborated within the scope of Mercosur. To this end, we will observe specific issues such as the time elapsed between the drafting and entry into force of the treaties and the process of incorporating Mercosur rules into the national legal systems of each member country. We conclude that the great obstacle to cooperation is, in the first place, to the fact that cooperation has a repressive character and is focused on classic crime control actions, a factor that fails to cover the dimension of the criminal network organization and, in part, due to the complexity of the system and the lack of harmonization between the Political Charters of each country, which directly impairs the applicability of the agreements. We will see that perhaps the study of supranationality can be help to deepen regional integration in Mercosur, harmonizing legislation through the adoption of complete rules.