ABSTRACT
The adoption of the December 1998 resolution marked the beginning of a process that will lead to an historic action by the international community in the fight against transnational organized crime. However, for all practical purposes, this process had begun a few years before the formal action by the General Assembly. The idea for a global international legal instrument against transnational organized crime first surfaced at the Naples Ministerial Conference on Organized Transnational Crime, in November 1994. The scepticism of some of the developed countries about the feasibility of negotiating such an instrument were at the root of the rather conditional language that found its way into the Naples Political Declaration and Global Action Plan, which was the main product of that event. But the seeds had been sown. Two follow-up regional ministerial conferences, in Buenos Aires in 1995 and in Dakar in 1997, served as fora for a large number of countries to voice their political support for the new convention and strongly urge the expedient commencement of negotiations. In
December 1996, Poland submitted a first draft of a possible convention to the General Assembly in an effort to boost the process and demonstrate that many of the issues that countries feared would be difficult to tackle were in fact much more accessible. The Commission on Crime Prevention, with its annual sessions, provided the opportunity for countries to continue exploring the matter and helped nurture the political will required for action. In 1997, the Commission moved a step closer to the formal endorsement of the new convention and the authorization to begin negotiations, by recommending to the General Assembly the adoption of a resolution with which it set up a group of governmental experts and asked it to explore the contours of an international convention. This group was hosted by Poland in Warsaw in February 1998 and compiled a list of options, which was in essence the first rough draft of a new convention. The product of the group's work was reviewed by the Commission in April 1998 and, as mentioned earlier, the Commission recommended to the General Assembly the adoption of the resolution, by virtue of which the Ad Hoc Committee was established.
