17th December 2000

First shot fired by UN in fight against transnational crime

For the Government in Sri Lanka, which is to re-introduce the death sentence to fight a mounting crime wave and is grappling with a separatist war for the past 18 years, there is good news this week from the southern Italian state of Sicily.

From its capital Palermo, one time home of the world's legendary crime syndicate, the Mafia, 14 heads of state, 100 ministers and 2,000 delegates gathered to adopt the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime - the first new international convention of the 21st century and the first legally binding UN instrument to fight organised crime.

Accompanying the convention are two protocols - one aimed against trafficking in persons, particularly women and children, and the other, against the smuggling of migrants. Negotiations have been concluded on a third protocol, against trafficking in firearms, but have not yet resulted in a final agreement.

By Thursday the Convention which required ratification by 40 countries to become effective, had received 118 signatures from the UN's 189 strong membership. That included the United States, United Kingdom, Russian Federation, Germany, Switzerland and France. However, key countries such as India and Bangladesh fielded low level delegations of officials. Pakistan signed only the Convention and not the protocols.

Even if Mafia killings in the current year had dwindled to a mere two from thousands in the past years, Italian authorities took no chances. More than 10,000 armed men - the Carabinieri, Polizia and Army commandos - stood almost every three yards around the conference venues.

Ambulances and armoured vehicles lay parked outside. Vibration from the roar of helicopters flying over the conference venues, including a magnificent palace over a thousand years old, made tables shudder frequently.

Palermitans still speak of what they call the 'Palermo Renaissance' in 1992, one of the most terrible years in the history of this picturesque city.

In the summer of that year, in two of the bloodiest Mafia massacres ever perpetrated, Giovanni Falcone (murdered together with his wife, Francesca Morvillo, herself a Magistrate) and Paolo Borsellino were killed, within an interval of just two months, together with several police officer escorts.

Falcone and Borsellino were the two Palermo Magistrates who, during the 1980s, led courageous and innovative judicial investigations, succeeding —together with only a few colleagues and brave police officers - first in discovering and then in beginning to smash the very structure of the Mafia. Until then, the fierce group had been wrapped in mystery and legend. It had been considered virtually inviolable.

Several hundred mafiosi, including many of the members of the so-called "Commission" (the governing body of "Cosa Nostra" or "Our Thing," the name the mafiosi called their own organisation) were indicted, found guilty and given long prison sentences.

By the late 1980s, Falcone and Borsellino had become symbols of the fight against crime, at an international level.

But for most of their fellow- townsfolk in Palermo, they came to represent something more-a sort of vision of what each of them wanted to be, though without their succeeding in doing so.

A large mass of the civilian public shared with Falcone and Borsellino a fundamental correctness of behaviour, the rejection of the arrogant violence of the Mafia, the rage at being always and everywhere unjustly labelled, en masse, as accomplices of delinquency, and awareness that the stifling yoke of crime on Sicilian society constituted the main obstacle to economic, social and cultural progress on this island.

However, unlike the two magistrates, Palermitans were incapable of finding within themselves sufficient motivation, courage and determination to rebel openly and to become the main actors in a process of rebirth and liberation from the shackles of the Mafia.

Top UN officials paid tribute to Magistrates Falcone and Borsellini.

Pino Arlachchi, Under Secretary General and Executive Director of the UN Office for Drugs Control and Crime Prevention said: "It is a tragedy that they are not here to be able to celebrate with us today. We know how they died - but it is important to remember how they lived and what they - and others like them - did for the people of this land and the world.

They did not die alone. Their spirit - and their courage - is in this hall..."

If there is relief that the scourge of the Mafia is vastly over, as Italian President Carlo Azeglio Campi, declared "organised crime believed it had gained unlimited scope through the advancements in information technology, which has opened new paths for the spread of criminal activities."

He told the opening sessions "we cannot waste time. It is up to us to close those paths."

UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, said the Convention "is evidence of the will of the international community to answer a global challenge with a global response."

He said "if crime crosses all borders, so must law enforcement."

The Convention also marks a new chapter in assistance between developed and developing countries by establishing a funding mechanism to help countries implement the Convention. Under that mechanism, regular voluntary contributions from countries would go to a special account for technical assistance to developing countries and countries with economies in transition.

A resolution passed last year by the UN General Assembly, an important goal of the Convention, is to get all countries to harmonise their national laws, so that there can be no uncertainty that a crime in one country is also a crime in another.

Furthermore, by passing new or updating existing national legislation on transnational criminal activity, all countries would be in a position to co-operate with each other in the investigation and prosecution of such crimes.

Under the treaty, countries must criminalize four types of offences - participation in an organised criminal group, money laundering, corruption and obstruction of justice.

The Convention provides a broad definition of transnationality, which will provide law enforcement authorities considerable possibilities in using it to track and apprehend criminals. A crime is considered transnational if it is: committed in more than one State; takes place in one State but is planned or controlled from another; is committed in one State by a criminal group that operates in several countries; or if the effects of a crime committed in one country are substantial in another.

A Conference of the Parties to the Convention has been set up to assist governments in combating transnational organised crime and also to promote and monitor implementation of the Convention. To that end, the Conference will meet no later than one year after the Convention has gone into force to agree on various measures, which could include: boosting the exchange of information among nations on patterns and trends in transnational organised crime; co-operating with relevant international and non-governmental organisations; checking periodically on the treaty's implementation; and making recommendations to improve the treaty and its implementation.

Like the Convention, the accompanying protocols "relate crucially to my country's national interests," Justice Minister, Batty Weerakoon, head of the two member Sri Lanka delegation told the conference. "Organised international crime has its commercial aspects. But today, it is not only commerce that is involved in it. It has political links too.

Political movements, especially when used as political instruments against established democratic governments need to find their resources from organised crime," he said.

In an obvious reference to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Mr. Weerakoon added "These are not necessarily within the black economy. They constitute very legitimate business. It is here that money laundering comes in.

These investments are a regular and dependable source of finance for terrorist movements. The proceeds of this commerce are used by these terrorist movements to buy arms and ammunition from both legal and illegal sources. Sri Lanka's legitimate and democratic government is today at the receiving end of this kind of international terrorism."

Ms. Dhara Wijetilleke, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Justice is the other member of the Sri Lankan delegation.

The Convention will undoubtedly add muscle to the Government's efforts to crack down on the LTTE internationally.

Provisions to deal with some of the transnational activities, like the ones indulged in by Tiger guerrillas are specifically spelt out.

For years now, criminal groups have been able to exploit the weaknesses in international law enforcement efforts.

Too often, all they have had to do was leave for another country, where different laws and different legal cultures made their prosecution or even extradition virtually impossible.

The basic idea behind the Convention is to get all countries to harmonise their national laws, so that there can be no uncertainty that a crime in one country is also a crime in another.

Another area of significance are extradition arrangements. Too often, the present arrangements for extraditing suspects are extremely few. At the same time, criminal groups have learned that there are advantages in being quick and nimble, engaging in criminal activity and moving on.

To keep criminal suspects from fleeing prosecution in one country and reaching freedom in another, the Convention aims to tighten up extradition proceedings. States Parties would be required: To recognise crimes covered by the Convention as extraditable, when no extradition treaty exists with the nation where the suspect is located; to speed up extradition procedures and to conclude bilateral and multilateral agreements to make extradition more effective; To tighten the net round organised criminal suspects who may have fled to foreign soil, States Parties to the Convention would agree to co-operate by assisting one another, collecting evidence and exchanging pertinent information.

Among the areas defined for mutual assistance are: Carrying out searches and seizures; Providing originals or certified copies of relevant documents and records, including bank, financial, corporate or business records; Permitting testimony or other assistance to be given via video links or other modern means of communication; Granting witnesses safe conduct when testifying in a second country; Granting immunity from prosecution or giving reduced penalties to people who co-operate substantively with law enforcers who are investigating an offence and entering into such arrangements with witnesses from one nation whose testimony is needed in another.

Governments are to be urged to develop training programmes for law enforcers, including prosecutors, magistrates and Customs personnel, to cover (a) trafficking routes and techniques used by organised criminal groups (b) Monitoring of the flow of contraband (c) Methods to combat money-laundering and other financial crimes (d) Modern law enforcement equipment and techniques, including electronic surveillance, controlled deliveries (allowing an illegal transaction to proceed in order to trap criminals) and undercover operations (e) Methods used to combat crime committed through computers, telecommunication networks or other forms of modern technology.

The protocols on trafficking in persons and the smuggling of migrants are also of crucial importance to Sri Lanka. Authorities in Palermo say they have evidence to establish that smuggling of migrants is a lucrative business in Sri Lanka, not only backed by a business mafia linked to influential politicians but also to corrupt law enforcement officers. Extensive investigations into this aspect had been sparked off after 124 Sri Lankans attempted to illegally enter Sicily late last month.

They landed in a dilapidated fishing boat at Catania, a coastal town

in this island. They had paid to human smuggling syndicates in Colombo sums ranging from 7000 to 10000 US dollars for their journey in search of a better world. They ended up in despair and are crowding Sicily's jails now.

By a coincidence, a section of the delegates and the media flew to Catania on Thursday to conduct an important aspect of their deliberations - "Forum for Global Action against Trafficking in Persons."

There has also been a number of side events in Palermo as part of the UN conference. Main among them was a symposium on "Transnational Organised Crime and the Media," attended by media professionals from around the world.

The session devoted hours to the media's responsibilities in reporting crime and the obstacles the media faced in doing so. Another was a symposium on "The rule of law in a Global Village."

To sum up the UN sessions in Palermo in Pino Arlachchi's words,

"First, it will help eliminate the inconsistencies among states that criminal networks are currently exploiting. Second, it brings together the best practices in combating criminal powers developed in several parts of the globe. And third, it contains the most advanced tool kit to ever be made available to policy makers, investigators and civil society to prevent large scale crimes.

"By this I mean: the confiscation of illicit assets, witness protection programmes, the criminalisation, limitation on bank secrecy, establishments of financial intelligence units, and other 'state of the art measures.' Together, they comprise a powerful global weapon to fight the mafias of the world during the coming decades."

The Fifth Column

Editorial/ Opinion Contents