International cooperation against terrorism and the development of international law principles of jurisdiction

The increase in the use of political terrorism over the last twenty-five years has evoked legal responses at both the national and the international level. The main thrust of the legal response of the international community has been the conclusion of conventions-at regional and global level-which seek to regulate, harmonize and/or extend the claims to criminal jurisdiction of the contracting States.1 In general, the conventions have been responses to particular problems such as hijacking or attacks on diplomats, but there is now a sufficient number of such conventions for it to be possible to isolate trends and perhaps to draw some conclusions about the way they have influenced the development of the customary international law on jurisdiction. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the general principles of international law which provide the framework within which the jurisdictional rules operate and then to examine some of the methods which the multilateral conventions have used to meet the problems posed by the disparate jurisdictional systems of States and the constraints of customary international law. The chapter will begin however with a brief review of the principles-accepted by international law-upon which the criminal jurisdiction of States is predicated,2 and an examination of the international law dimensions of extradition and deportation, which are the main procedural means by which an offender-or more precisely a fugitive offender (such as a transnational terrorist)—may be brought before national courts.