Two interconnected processes that are fundamental to current developments in criminal law are at the heart of the department's research interests: (1.) the increasingly transnational nature of crime associated with globalization and (2.) the change in risks and risk perceptions associated with the complex forms of crime that accompany the risk and information society, especially in connection with terrorism, organized crime, and white-collar crime. Both processes push traditional criminal law to its territorial and functional limits.
1. The territorial limits of criminal law and the possibilities of transcending these limits through transnationally effective criminal law form the first research focus, the goal of which is the construction of a theory of integration of criminal law on the international level. This focus is based on the assumption – explained more extensively in the research program – that the increase in transnational crime is due primarily to the technical, commercial, and political changes of globalization, from which new opportunities for the commission of offenses across national boundaries emerge, e.g., in international data networks and global illegal markets. These new opportunities for the commission of transnational crime challenge the territorial limits of national criminal law because national criminal law has difficulty counteracting transnational crime when the recognition of national decisions in foreign territories depends on protracted administrative and/or mutual judicial assistance procedures and when the national criminal justice systems involved differ from one another. Thus, increased harmonization of criminal law is not the only prerequisite for successful prosecution of transnational crime; rather, new systems of a transnationally effective criminal law are needed in which – as, for example, in European Criminal Law – the traditional models of intergovernmental cooperation and supranational criminal law are further developed into hybrid forms and complex multi-level systems of social control.
Studies within the purview of this first research focus include the joint international project "Les chemins de l'harmonisation pénale," which examines the forces behind the harmonization of criminal law as well as methods and models of harmonization. In a larger project on European Criminal Law, the goals, models, and systems of transnationally effective criminal law are being studied with a view towards future legal policy; additional projects include studies on the principle of mutual recognition of judicial decisions in European Criminal Law, on European criminal defense, on European systems of criminal procedure, as well as a systematic, comprehensive overview of European Criminal Law. On a global level, the effect of United Nations Security Council resolutions on the shaping of national criminal law, the evolution of general legal principles in international criminal law, and criteria for the development of international core crimes are being analyzed.
2. The second research focus is on the functional limits of criminal law and the opportunities for new, alternative measures of social control that lead to a theory of the functional limits of criminal law. This focus is based on the assumption that the technical, economic, and political changes taking place in the information and risk society produce increased risks for society as well as increasingly complex crime, both of which elude the grasp of the traditional "standard program" of criminal law. This is apparent, for example, in the tactics practiced by widely ramified offender groups – namely, the international division of labor and the use of new forms of technology – as well as in the potential for destruction and damage exhibited by new forms of terrorism, organized crime, white-collar crime, and Internet crime. The accompanying loss of control experienced by traditional, national criminal law is compensated for by means of new networks of intergovernmental collaboration; secret measures of technical surveillance; a prevention-oriented "security law" that includes aspects of police law, secret service law, immigration law, and the law of war (some of these measures belong to the criminal law whereas others do not); provisions obliging private persons to cooperate in crime prevention; as well as alternative measures of social control (e.g., by means of the "regulated self-regulation" of the economy). These compensatory efforts are used in criminal policy discussions of security to legitimate the shifting of the limits of criminal law.
Currently, studies within the purview of this second focus include, in the area of terrorism and organized crime, an examination of the preventive detention of potentially dangerous terrorist offenders, control orders in English criminal law for use against putative terrorists, the prohibition and restriction of torture, anti-terrorism in China, the regulation of cyberterrorism in international criminal law, the new special criminal law against organized crime in France, the prosecution of organized crime in Latin America, the comparison of conspiracy (in English criminal law) with the crime of providing assistance to a criminal organizations) (in German criminal law).
Additional studies on complex crime in the context of Internet crime include the extraterritorial prosecution of cybercrime, the use of blocking orders in order to enforce national criminal laws against illegal content in the global cyberspace, the role of anonymity in the Internet, procedural aspects of the prosecution of data network crime, online searches, the clandestine creation of movement profiles for the purpose of criminal prosecution, responsibility for hyperlinks in the Internet, as well as a general analysis of information criminal law.Additional projects in the context of white-collar crime include a study of the feasibility of obliging the business community to participate in crime prevention, a study of controlled self-regulation (compliance), and a study of the responsibility and sanctioning of businesses with special emphasis on compliance measures. These projects are supplemented, in the area of medical law, by a study on pharmaceutical counterfeiting and a project on the protection of extracorporeal embryos. Additional projects tackle comprehensive issues such as the limits on the protection of legal interests and the treatment of so-called "mass" crime.