The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime will formally launch in New York on the 19th September 2013.

The event will feature a keynote speech by Moisés Naím of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of “Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy”. The keynote will be followed by three panel discussions:

The first is a debate on Organized Crime, Democracy, Development, and State Fragility, with the panel made up of Vidar Helgesen, Secretary-General of International IDEA; Sarah Cliffe, Special Adviser and Assistant Secretary-General for the Civilian Capacities Unit, DPKO at the United Nations, and James Cockayne, a leading scholar on the impact of organized crime on statehood and state fragility.

The second panel looks at Environmental Crime: Towards a better response, and will feature a debate around a report by the Global Initiative Team which assesses the state of the global responses to environmental crime.  The paper will be presented by Justin Gosling, with responses by John M. Sellar, former CITES Chief of Law Enforcement and independent expert, and Julian Rademeyer, journalist and author of the best-selling book “Killing for Profit – Exposing the illegal rhino horn trade“.

The final panel will discuss Countering the Cybercrime Avalanche, moderated by moderated by Jeff Frazier, General Manager, World Wide Government, National Security and International Organizations, Microsoft, with interventions from Troels Oerting, Head: European Cybercrime Centre with interventions from Raj Samani, Chief Technology Officer from McAfee and John Suffolk, Global Head of Cyber Security, Huawei.

The goal of the launch as a whole is to debate the state of play in these three priority areas, to evaluate current responses and to see where the Global Initiative with its Network of Experts can add value to catalyzing new approaches.

The day of meetings will be concluded by a cocktail event co-hosted by the Governments of Norway and Mexico, at the International Peace Institute premises in New York.