Exporting Harmful People

Abstract

Many states commit to uphold human rights either through domestic legislation and/or through international treaties. In doing so they may adopt forms of cosmopolitan extraterritoriality whereby they can extend the criminal liability of their own citizens and corporations, for their actions abroad. Utilizing Linklater’s work on conceptualizing and classification of harm, the chapter analyses the domestic motivations for the implementation of Australia’s extraterritorial child sex tourism (CST) laws in 1994, and explores the actual implementation of laws via a review of selected prosecutions from 1995 to 2014, as well as international cooperation efforts that have evolved over time. The account presented here is not that the Australian state is a unitary cosmopolitan actor. Rather, it argues that under certain circumstances, the state is willing to partner with non-governmental organizations and responsive citizens (domestic and international) to be a vehicle for realizing cosmopolitan values in some policy realms/areas of interest. The chapter provides a theoretically informed empirical account of why extraterritorial law was enacted, which agents supported it and why, and how it has been mobilized over time by a ‘disaggregated’ Australian state.