Transnational Criminal Law and the Transnational Legal Ordering of Corruption: Directions of Change in Australian Corporate Foreign Bribery Law
Radha Ivory
Abstract
To date, “transnational criminal law” has been the dominant paradigm for explaining and mapping rules on corruption in the international legal literature. Transnational criminal law is presented as a system of law descending from multilateral crime control treaties or a field of rules that emerges through international political processes of regime formation. Transnational criminal lawyers identify and describe legal rules, and seek to evaluate them against liberal norms of democratic governance and individual civil and political human rights. This paper details the limits of transnational criminal conceptions of “anticorruption” through a study of proposed changes to Australian laws on corporate foreign bribery. Drawing on primary and secondary documentary sources, domestic and international, it shows that emerging antipodean rules are only partially transnational, as that term is understood in transnational criminal law theory. Likewise, multilateral “suppression conventions” are but one impetus for changes to federal anticorruption laws. The Australian reforms disclose significant borrowing from the UK. In addition, as the transnational legal ordering literature suggests, a process appears to be at work between international organizations, local legislators, and foreign law enforcers, as well as transnational non‐state actors, both charities and companies. Adding to transnational legal theorists’ effort to study rules on deviance, Australian anticorruption reforms would also seem to foresee, not just in changes to national criminal law, but also the development of “new” – and controversial – techniques of governance.