By  Mathew H. Charles

Ecuador’s coastline has become a key despatch point for international drug traffickers exporting cocaine that has been produced in Colombia and Peru. As a result, Ecuador, and its port city of Guayaquil in particular, have become the latest epicentre of the world’s drug violence as local gangs battle for supremacy to impress international traffickers and assume a larger share of the country’s lucrative cocaine industry. Key points • The Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) cartels from Mexico use maritime routes and a network of “go-fast” vessels (GFVs) and fishing boats to ship cocaine to Central America and the USA. • International traffickers, including Albanian gangs and other criminal structures from the Balkans, contaminate international shipping at the port of Guayaquil in Guayas to ship cocaine to Europe. • In 2021, the police say they seized a record 210 tonnes of cocaine in Guayaquil, up from 128 tonnes in 2020. • In 2021, the province of Esmeraldas registered its highest murder count for seven years with a total of 79 homicides. In the first 8 months of 2022, the number has increased to 304. • In the city of Guayaquil, the homicide rate has doubled to 34.1 per 100,000 inhabitants in the past 12 months, making it one of the world’s most dangerous cities.   

University of Rosario, Observatorio Colombiano de Crimen Organizado (OCCO), 2022. 5p.

Edited by Magdalena Bainczyk and Agnieszka Kubiak-Cyrul

Although more than 75 years have elapsed since the end of the Second World War, the magnitude of crimes and their long-term effects, caused also by lawyers e.g. in German special courts, make the subject of liability of the state in the context of the Second World War ever topical and valid. Historia magistra vitae est, and the process of learning from history should in this case cover not only the years 1933–1945, but also the entire post-war period. Justice was neither restored nor meted out. One of the reasons for the lack of administration of justice was West Germany's conscious policy of personal continuity after the Second World War. The latter was the topic of the Rosenburg Exhibition – the Federal Ministry of Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany in the Shadow of National Socialist Past. The texts grew out of the context of the exhibition and show the far-reaching consequences of War and Nazi crimes in international relations of a legal nature.

Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021. 226p.

Edited by Nicole Westmarland and Geetanjali Gangoli

This book gives an overview of the socio-legal and political approaches taken in relation to rape across nine countries worldwide. It is written at a time in which many governments have begun to take rape more seriously than in the past and have started to implement wide-ranging reforms.This is therefore an ideal time to describe what that range of reforms has been, and to assess the degree to which they have been successful. In this introductory chapter, we briefly introduce ourselves and the chapters that follow, while pulling out some of the themes that cut across the chapters.

Bristol University Press. (2012). 248 pages.

Edited by Nicole Westmarland and Geetanjali Gangoli.

“The book gives an overview of the socio-legal and political approaches taken in relation to rape across nine countries worldwide. It is written at a time in which many governments have begun to take rape more seriously than in the past and have started to implement wide-ranging reforms.This is therefore an ideal time to describe what that range of reforms has been, and to assess the degree to which they have been successful.”

Policy Press (2011) 249 pages.