Dr Vicky Comino is a Senior Lecturer at the TC Beirne School of Law at The University of Queensland. Dr Comino's main research area is corporate law, and in particular the regulation of corporate misconduct. Before commencing an academic career, she practised as a solicitor working at a top tier law firm in the fields of corporate law, leasing, commercial and residential conveyancing, strata development, securities and opinion work. Over the years, Dr Comino has worked voluntarily for Legal Aid, South Brisbane Immigration & Community Legal Service, Women's Equal Opportunity (WEO) and Justice and the Law Society (JATL) (UQ). She has also served on numerous committees, most recently as the chair of a major Queensland Law Society accreditation committee for the accreditation of lawyers as Business Law Specialists. Dr Comino's recent articles have addressed important topics in the corporations law area. Those topics include the difficulties facing the use of civil penalties by calling for Parliament to pass legislation to resolve procedural obstacles, the adequacy of ASIC's 'tool-kit' to deal with corporate and financial wrongdoing, including the deployment of 'new' enforcement tools, such as enforceable undertakings and the possibilities and limits of the use of 'corporate culture' as a regulatory mechanism. Her 2015 monograph Australia's "Company Law Watchdog" – ASIC and Corporate Regulation, which focuses on exploring how, and to what extent, a public authority like ASIC can achieve more effective regulation certainly comes at a time when ASIC's performance is increasingly under the microscope. This is in view of its mixed record of success in some highly publicised cases and a seemingly endless procession of corporate and financial scandals, such as those that engulfed the major Australian banks, prompting not only a number of parliamentary inquiries into ASIC's performance and capabilities, but the establishment of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. Her book also consolidates her position as a leading Australian researcher on corporate regulation, with her work cited in the Final Report of the Banking Royal Commission and reports of the Australian Law Reform Commission on Corporate Criminal Responsibility. Dr Comino's research has global relevance and she has extended her work beyond Australia to evaluate international developments, especially in the US and the UK. She is examining the different responses of regulators to the dilemmas presented by policing corporate and securities violations in the aftermath of, and since, the GFC to try to resolve the issue of how policy-makers and regulators should deal with corporate wrongdoing more effectively in the future. She also travelled to the UK in 2018 after being awarded a Liberty Fellowship from the University of Leeds to undertake collaborative work comparing corporate regulation there and in Australia. Dr Comino holds the degrees of BA, LLB (Hons), LLM and PhD (UQ), and is a Fellow of the Australian Centre for Private Law (UQ).
Dr Radha Ivory is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Queensland, Australia (UQ), where she teaches company law and researches the transnational regulation of corruption and corporate crime.
Her work explores the interlocking domestic and international laws that aim to govern powerful economic and political actors, from politically exposed persons to multinational enterprises. Radha asks what these laws require of whom; how they develop and change across borders; and how we can better appraise and design them to manage their unintended consequences. Her approach is interdisciplinary, using doctrinal legal and socio-legal methodologies, as well as insights from economics, sociology, and international relations. Current projects focus on the human rights impacts of asset recovery laws, the reform of transnational anticorruption and corporate criminal laws, and the securitisation of integrity regulations (corporate ‘lawfare’).
Radha’s research has appeared in leading law journals (International & Comparative Law Quarterly, London Review of International Law, UNSW Law Journal) and important edited collections (e.g., Krieger/Peters/Kreuzer, Due Diligence in the International Legal Order, Oxford University Press; Aaronson/Shaffer, Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice, Cambridge University Press). Her sole-authored book, Corruption, Asset Recovery, and the Protection of Property in Public International Law: The Human Rights of Bad Guys was published by Cambridge University Press and launched by former Australian federal treasurer, The Hon. Peter Costello AC. Her work with Pieth on corporate criminal liability is also widely cited. A regular speaker at international conferences and meetings, Radha has been a visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and has delivered presentations at the University of Melbourne, the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), and the University of Bergen.
Radha’s scholarship is informed by her past and ongoing roles in the international and private sectors. She commenced her career at Freehills (now Herbert Smith Freehills) in Brisbane, Australia, before joining an NGO self-governance and compliance initiative, Building Safer Organisations in Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to commencing at UQ, Radha was a Senior Expert, Collective Action and Compliance, at the Basel Institute on Governance, Switzerland. In that role, she supported Ukraine and Colombia in anticorruption project design and implementation. During her PhD studies, Radha held research roles in the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) and the University of Basel. Radha currently consults to the World Bank and has previously been engaged by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. She is on the Advisory Board of the Bribery Prevention Network, Australia.
Radha was awarded a PhD (summa cum laude) from the University of Basel, and Bachelors of Arts (International Relations and German) and Laws (Hons I) from UQ.
Dr Hai Thanh Luong is currently conducting his Research Fellow in Cyber Criminology at the School of Social Science and a member of HDR Committee as well as collaborating with UQ Cyber Centre. Additionally, he is a member of the Global Initiative Network's Expert against Transnational Organized Crime (GI TOC) and also a senior researcher and chair of the Asian Drug Crime Research Committee at the Institute for Asian Crime and Security (IACS), the U.S while holding an Associate Research Fellow at the Social and Global Studies Centre, RMIT University. Dr Hai has a Bachelor of Law (Criminal Investigation) and has spent twenty years researching and teaching in police institutions across the mainland Southeast Asian region, particularly in Vietnam. In 2010, as one of the new emergent scholars for the Australian Development Scholarship in non-traditional security threat fields, he was awarded a full scholarship to gain a Master in Transnational Crime Prevention at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. In 2017 he earned a PhD (criminology) at the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, after examining the complicated structure and modus operandi of several transnational drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle across the borderland between Vietnam and Laos in his thesis. His interests include cybercrime, policing in cybercrime/cybersecurity, drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, police training, environmental crimes and biological threats. As a research fellow in cyber criminology at the UQ, he prioritises exploring what, why, and how the human factors impact trends and patterns of cybercrime and applying criminological theories to analyse the criminal network structure and crime script of cyber-related crimes. His latest book 'Transnational Drug Trafficking across the Vietnam and Laos Border' was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. He has also published several papers in various academic journals (Asian Survey; Journal of Crime and Justice; International Journal of Cyber Criminology; International Journal of Drug Policy; Policing and Society; International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy; and Trends in Organized Crime, among others). In 2020, he was awarded the Young Asian Criminologists from the Asian Criminological Society (ASC).
As a member of the Asian Regional Law Enforcement Management Program (ARLEMP), funded by the Australian Federal Police and hosted by the Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam and RMIT Hanoi, he contributed to building a comprehensive connection among law enforcement agencies, policymakers, and academia across Asian countries to prevent and combat serious and transnational crimes since 2005. Accordingly, he has collaborated with law enforcement agencies (police, customs, border guards, coast/maritime guards, and rangers) to exchange, discuss, and research the trends and patterns of transnational crimes across the Southeast Asia region through joining and consulting at the Australia-Mekong Partnership and the U.S.-Mekong Dialogue against Transnational Crimes. Recently, he presented and worked closely with many international and regional organisations, including the UNODC Regional Office for Southeast Asia and the Pacific (Bangkok, Thailand), ASEANPOL, and AFP and consulted with the Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam and the Ministry of Justice of Vietnam. He has gained research funds from the GI TOC, UNODC, Harm Reduction International, International Drug Policy Consortium, Australian Government, the U.S. Department of State, and Vietnamese Government in recent ten years.
Andreas Schloenhardt is Professor of Criminal Law in the School of Law at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia and Honorary Professor for Foreign and International Criminal Law in the Faculty of Law, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria. P
Professor Schloenhardt is the convenor of the Transnational Organised Crime programme (https://toc.jura.uni-koeln.de/), a research and learning network with academic staff and students from the University of Vienna (Austria), the University of Zurich (Switzerland), the University of Cologne (Germany), the University of Ferrara (Italy), and the University of Queensland (Australia). Professor Schloenhardt holds a PhD in Law from The University of Adelaide. Prior to his position at The University of Queensland, he was a lecturer at The University of Adelaide Law School.
Professor Schloenhardt’s principal areas of research include criminal law, organised crime, smuggling of migrants, trafficking in persons, wildlife trafficking, narco-trafficking, terrorism, criminology, and immigration and refugee law. He is the author of many books and journal articles and his work is frequently cited by other scholars, in government reports, and judicial decisions, including the High Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of Austria.
Professor Schloenhardt has held adjunct appointments and visiting professorships at the University of Zurich, the University of St Gallen, the University of Ferrara, Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law , The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and the Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California. In 2011-2012, Professor Schloenhardt was a recipient of a Fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.
Professor Schloenhardt is a member of the Austrian Society of Criminal Law and Criminology and he has worked extensively with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Council of Europe, the Global Initiative against Transnational Crime, the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) and a range of law enforcement agencies in Australia and Asia.
