National Legal Consultant - Malaysia

CULTIVATING CAPACITY: THE RISE OF FOREIGN INFLUENCE AND ITS IMPACT ON CRIMINALITY IN SOUTH EAST ASIA 

Start date: As soon as possible

Duration: 3-month contract

Consultancy fee: Dependant on Experience

Location: Malaysia

Background 

 

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) is implementing a 30-month project to explore the phenomenon of foreign criminal influence in South East Asia. The project focusses on Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines and aims to strengthen countries’ resilience and enhance capacity to anticipate and respond to foreign-linked criminality, including within their legal systems. 

 

To ensure that the diverse array of perspectives and experiences of tackling organized criminality across South East Asia are integrated into the project, the Organization will engage a multi-stakeholder community through a series of national and regional events, including national roundtables, a legal expert forum and a regional conference. The key stakeholders which the project looks to engage across South East Asia are:

 

• Law enforcement officers 
• Members of the judiciary and legal experts
• Policy makers and government officials  
• Civil society actors 

 

Through these engagement events, the stakeholders and the Organization will co-design a suitable and collaborated set of responses and tools to strengthen and enhance resilience which will be delivered through capacity building sessions delivered to government agencies, institutions and interest groups. 

 

Understanding legal systems that may support targeted interventions to combat foreign criminality is a key focus of this project. The Legal Consultant, working with an internationally-appointed Legal Consultant, will be responsible for working collaboratively to assess regional and domestic legal systems and their touchpoints with international legal frameworks and, importantly, understanding their applicability to the phenomenon being examined.

 

The aim of the consultancy is to deliver outputs that set out an understanding of the obligations and opportunities of member states under international and domestic law to apply legislative interventions to tackle transnational crimes driven by foreign criminality. 

 

Description of Service 

 

This Description of Service attempts to cover the envisioned workload required from the Consultant to ensure the successful delivery, however changes may be necessary as the project progresses and due to circumstances outside of the Organization’s control. Where this is the case, the Organization will inform the Consultant as early as possible to discuss possible solutions. The Consultant will engage in these discussions and approach them with reasonable flexibility. 

 

The Organization will engage the services of a national legal expert for each country who will provide local legal expertise to the Organization and the International Legal Consultant throughout the Consultancy. The Consultant will assist in identifying an appropriate external expert from each target country who will provide a range of services, which will include attending Phase 3 interviews alongside the Consultant, providing an expert review of the legal work to date, reviewing the legal toolkit and attending the legal forum.  

Phase 1 - Review of Effectiveness of National Legislation

Relevant national legislation will be identified and its effectiveness and level of implementation assessed in terms of its applicability to address the threat of foreign-linked criminality. The consultant will provide below services before and during the legal review:

• The consultant will provide local legislative challenges, local context, and doing research on existing legislation and case law in local language.
• The consultant will identify relevant stakeholders, organise interviews and carry out the interviews working closely with the International Legal Consultant. 
• The consultant will review the relevant project documentation and provide feedback/suggestion that fits the local context. 
• It is estimated that this activity will be carried out primarily in May and conclude in mid June 2025. We anticipate that this will require approximately 24 working days.

Phase 2 – Development and Presentation of External Facing Outputs

This consists of two key activities. The first is assisting with and attending the legal forum (in Bangkok), and the second is to contribute to and review the ‘Countering Foreign Influence Toolkit’ which will be based on a combination of the legal research and discussions from the legal forum.

Legal Forum

The ‘Legal Forum’ is planned to be held late July / early August 2025, though final dates are to be confirmed. The aim of output is to increase the preparedness and ability of the target countries to act and respond to the evolving threat of foreign criminality. To achieve this, the forum will consider if and how it is possible to build appropriate resilience to foreign criminality into legal systems, to stimulate institutional awareness and to influence attitudes.

The consultant will be required to:

• Advise the Organization on possible attendees. It is envisioned that approx. 60 regional legislators and legal personnel will attend the forum.
• Attend and engage in the legal forum in Bangkok, Thailand, and the associated networking opportunities.
• Present findings on local legal context and situation in a 20-minute presentation with power point slides formatted in the GI-TOC style. Presentation to be agreed with the Organization in advance.
• Actively participate in discussions and using knowledge of legal research to entice participation and conversation from attendees.
• Make notes of salient points raised during the discussions which will be important to the creation of the ‘Countering Foreign Influence Toolkit’.

 

Countering Foreign Influence Toolkit

A ‘Countering Foreign Influence Toolkit’ will be created which builds on the foundational and legal research, and the information gained throughout the roundtable events and legal forum. Rather than describing the problem, this toolkit will contain solutions for different types of challenges faced by different regional actors.

The Organization will take the lead in the production of this toolkit with the Consultant providing the below services.

• Share their insights and viewpoints following the Legal Forum.
• Provide advice and suggestion on the local context and the current legal progress.
• Participate in discussions and provide suggestions based on their experience pertaining to the planning of the toolkit, its structure and contents.

 

It is estimated that the successful completion of Phase 2 will need approximately 15 working days and will be completed by end of September 2025.

Phase 3 – Participation in Stakeholder Capacity Building Sessions

Using the ‘Countering Foreign Influence Toolkit’, targeted training courses will be provided to legislative and judicial bodies in the four focus countries on how to build resilience into the legal system – both in terms of drafting and implementation – to strengthen institutional awareness. The trainings will be informed an encouraged by the sharing of gender and human rights perspectives and by providing good practice examples from South East Asia and globally. The training courses are planned to take place in October and November 2025. There will be one course delivered in total.

The Organization will take the lead in the production and delivery of the training courses, with the Consultant providing the below services.

• Assist in the developing of the training course based on past experience and in coordination with international legal consultant. 
• Draw upon their professional network to assist the Organization in the identification of possible attendees.
• Develop one-hour course based on the legal section of the toolkit (above), to be delivered as part of each capacity building session.
• Attend the capacity building session and support in the delivery of the training material. 

 

It is estimated that the successful completion of Phase 3 will need approximately 20 working days and will be completed by end of December 2025.

 

Supervision

The Consultant will be managed and under the supervision of the project manager, Louise Taylor, Director of Asia and the Pacific, who may delegate responsibility to another member of the GI-TOC team. The consultant is expected to work closely with the Project Staff and the International Legal Consultant to provide legal and technical advice to emerging and other project outputs.

 

 

Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

 

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime makes use of BambooHR's ATS system to receive and review your application. All correspondence related to your application will be sent via our domain globalinitiative.bamboohr.com.