The government of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) - the country’s predominant religious group - recently underwent back-to-back changes in each institution’s respective leadership. This coincidence of timing has afforded a unique opportunity to reexamine the status of...

Timor Leste's formal legal system is in disarray. Its major legal institutions suffer from serious budgetary, competence and integrity problems. In recent years, countries with similar problems, such as Bangladesh and the Philippines, have allowed the use of local village-level dispute...

A decade after 9/11, the international field of counter-terrorism is now thick with law. But that does not mean that the law is coherent or legitimate. The birth of new rules, institutions and processes can be anarchic. New norms overlay older, pre-existing legal forms and regimes, generating...

The paper argues that without a realistic understanding of criminal enterprise located against the commercial forces shaping contemporary Asian market contexts, then domestic, bi-lateral, regional and international control initiatives are not only likely to fail in their regulatory objectives,...

In 2011, the Appeals Chamber of the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon purported to identify a customary international crime of transnational terrorism and applied it in interpreting domestic terrorism offences under Lebanese law. This article argues that the Tribunal's decision was incorrect...

The killing of five young Australian, New Zealander and British journalists at the village of Balibo during the Indonesian invasion of Portuguese Timor in 1975 has long been surrounded by controversy, obfuscation and intrigue. While many suspected that the journalists were deliberately killed by...

Controversy has erupted in many jurisdictions about the inclusion of a motive element in the criminal law definition of terrorism, in particular whether reference to a political, religious or ideological purpose or cause unjustifiably interferes in freedom of expression and freedom of religion,...

There has been considerable ambivalence in the response of the international community and different national governments towards the problem of how to respond to individual terrorist acts and sustained campaigns of terrorist violence. Responses vacillate between a desire to punish and deter...

This article assesses Australia’s approach to the development and implementation of international law addressing transnational and domestic terrorism. It first considers Australia’s engagement with treaties dealing with terrorism since the 1960s to the present, and earlier efforts by the...

The surprising Decision by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in 2011 that transnational terrorism in peacetime is a customary international law crime sparked controversy. Until then there was a widespread belief that there existed neither an agreed definition nor an international crime of...