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Conference at Illinois focuses on police activities as they relate to terrorism
Mark Reutter,
Business & Law Editor
217-333-0568; mreutter@illinois.edu
3/1/2005
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
The University of Illinois College of Law will sponsor a conference Friday and Saturday (March 11 and 12) on the regulation of police activities
aimed at fighting terrorism and other forms of international crime.
The conference includes law professors and sociologists from Europe
and the United States who will assess the dramatic changes in criminal
statutes, police powers and intelligence activities in the wake of the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It will be held at the Max L. Rowe
Auditorium in the Law Building, 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave., Champaign.
Among other issues, the panelists will explore the “difficulties
of democratic oversight of more aggressive policing techniques, the
implications of new powers for transnational collaboration in fighting
crime, and the feedback effect that international cooperation has upon
domestic law enforcement.”
Law-enforcement initiatives that began in the 1980s and were significantly
expanded after Sept. 11 “raise important questions about how the
United States and Europe can respond to threats while retaining their
democratic character and preserving civil liberties,” said Jacqueline
E. Ross, the conference organizer and Illinois law professor.
The first day of the conference will include papers and discussions
on undercover police activities in Germany, France, Israel and Italy.
Gary Marx, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
will give the introductory lecture, and Cyrille Fijnaut, a law professor
at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, will speak at lunch.
On the second day, Peter B. Maggs, an Illinois law professor, will lead
the roundtable discussions on undercover policing in Ukraine with five
scholars from Eastern Europe, and commentators from Illinois, the University
of Chicago Law School, and other institutions.
The fee for the conference is $75.
In addition to the College of Law,
the conference is sponsored by the American Society of Comparative law,
and, at the U. of I., the Center
for the Study of Democratic Governance, the Cross-Campus
Initiative on Institutions in a Demographically Changing World,
the department of sociology,
the European Union Center, International Programs
and Studies, and the Police Training
Institute.
