Legal Frameworks

Law and regulatory perspectives pervade many aspects of the CEPS research agenda, and intersect with many projects within the various research program areas.

Key 2011 project activities and outcomes:

A CEPS special issue in the Criminal Law Journal (Volume 35/6, December 2011) was published, profiling research from CEPS with a thematic issue on new paradigms in policing in Australia. The Centre Director, Professor Bronitt, was the guest editor, and introduced the collection with an editorial “New policing paradigms in Australia: Integrating
research into practice”. Contributors included not only Chief Investigators, but also Associate Investigators, CEPS Visiting Scholars, PhD Candidates and Honours placement students.

Earlier research on the topic of cross-border policing, developed through workshops and conferences held in 2009 and 2010, has been profiled in an edited collection on ‘Cross-Border Law Enforcement: Regional Law Enforcement
Cooperation – European, Australian and Asia-Pacific Perspectives’ (Routledge Publishers 2012), and was launched at the ANU Centre for European Studies in November 2011.

At the Onati Workshop on Terrorism and Human Rights, Dr Saskia Hufnagel presented on ‘Cross-Border Law Enforcement in the Area of Counter-Terrorism: Maintaining Human Rights in Transnational Policing’. Professor Simon Bronitt, together with PhD Candidate Sue Donkin also presented on ‘Australian Responses to 9/11: A New World Legal Hybrid?’ at this workshop. These papers will be published in the edited collection that follows from this workshop.

PhD research supported by this project ‘Comparison of Cross-Border Law Enforcement Strategies in Australia and the European Union’ by Dr Saskia Hufnagel was presented at a seminar at the University of Helsinki (Finland) with a focus on EU Nordic Cooperation and Australian regional cooperation strategies (August 2011); at a conference in Reykjavik
(Iceland) with a focus on Organised Crime (August 2011); at a seminar at Maastricht University with a focus on EU and Australian regional cooperation strategies (August 2011); and at a seminar at the University of Amsterdam with a focus on formal and informal cooperation strategies in December 2011. The research will be published as a book in 2012. The travel to the seminar presentation at the University of Amsterdam was supported financially by the University of Amsterdam and the paper drafted for this presentation will be published in a resulting edited collection (Professor Monica den Boer of the Police Academy of the Netherlands and Ludo Block of Grant Thornton Forensic & Investigation Services B.V as editors).

Professors Bronitt and Chappell, and Dr Hufnagel were awarded a competitive GU research grant to host an international Griffith University workshop on ‘Investigating Art Crime’ in early 2012.

Plans for 2012:

Publication of ‘Indigenous crime and settler law: White Sovereignty after Empire’ (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming) by Heather Douglas (The University of Queensland) and Mark Finnane.
Planning for a major conference in 2013 in Canberra on policing and the protection of human rights.
Co-hosting of an international workshop on Chinese criminal procedure.