Publishing the Documents of the Lyon Group of Senior Experts on Transnational Crime and G8 Videoconferencing Support, Final Report

• NCJ Number: 192293
• Date Published: 2001
• Length: 40 pages
• Grant Number(s): 99-IJ-CX-0057
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)

Annotation

Three times a year the Lyon Group of Senior Experts on Transnational Organized Crime from the Group of Eight (G8) assembles to discuss issues related to transnational organized crime and suggest ways to harmonize policies across the G8; the project reported in this paper recommends how to improve communication among the G8 members by providing a test bed for new videoconferencing facilities.

Abstract

At each meeting of the Lyon Group of Senior Experts on Transnational organized Crime, from 30-60 documents are generated that must be made available to all of the members. At the U.S. State Department's request, through April 1999 the Rule of Law Foundation had archived on CD-ROM over 300 documents that dated back to 1995; the CD-ROM has been distributed to the G8 members. These documents were also made available on a secure private channel on the World Justice Information Network. In September 1999, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) approved a project to recover these costs and continue to update the archive an additional two meetings, which were estimated to total approximately 100 documents. In fact, 131 new documents were archived during the course of the project, bringing the total number of documents to 439. The current effort to provide a test bed for new videoconferencing facilities required a technical upgrade of the NIJ Internet Studio, providing the added benefits of sustaining the growth of the World Justice Information Network and offering a number of online services for the users. These efforts have enabled the Lyon Group to better keep track of the proceedings of its meetings and to spend less time searching for documents it must reference for its current business. The Internet studio upgrade has yielded many benefits, with Internet videoconferencing capability and the beginning of distance learning projects. This has laid the groundwork for improved international communication with NIJ and the U.S. State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. This report provides a preliminary version of what will eventually be a comprehensive collection of the documents of the Lyon Group, from its inception in the statement of the Halifax Summit in June 1995 through the third meeting of the German presidency in November 1999.