… And, in 2003, national legislative actions addressing money laundering

UN Chronicle, Summer, 1998 by Pino Arlacchi

I have traveled from Bogota to Bonn and many points in between over the past year. I've discussed drug control issues with Presidents and senior government officials, but I also went out into the field. I talked to peasant farmers, local leaders and the people who are working to eliminate the supply and demand on the frontlines. Almost universally, people are convinced that the time is coming when illegal drugs are going to be very hard to find.

On a trip in February, I was struck by how effective the national alternative plans are already working in the Andean region. Statistics once again tell the story. UNDCP estimates that in Peru in 1990 over 200 thousand hectares were under coca cultivation. Seven years later, it's les than 70 thousand hectares. Only ten years ago in Bolivia, 41,000 hectares were cultivated with the coca plant. Today, the amount of land under coca cultivation has dropped by almost 20 per cent.

Transnational organized crime has become a major force in world finance. We can talk about globalization, new technology and the information age, but the fact is there are more opportunities than ever before for drug traffickers to make their "dirty" money "clean". The situation is changing overnight as methods of money laundering become even more sophisticated.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that 2 to 5 per cent of the global gross domestic product comes from laundered money. According to UNDCP, this represents between $300 billion and $400 billion annually, or approximately 8 per cent of total international trade. At a time when trade barriers all over the world are coming down, money laundering undermines the smooth functioning of markets and has a negative impact on economic growth.

It has been ten years since the 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which addressed money laundering as an international problem for the first time. Today, an estimated 70 per cent of all Member States still do not have proper legislation to remedy this obstacle to criminal investigations. The General Assembly is expected to establish the year 2003 as the target date to enact appropriate national money laundering legislation.

UNDCP and its crime prevention sister organization - now under the single Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP) - have launched the Global Programme Against Money Laundering. It is in the second year of a three-year mandate. It provides Governments with assistance in adopting effective legislation and it bolsters their detection and enforcement capabilities.

ODCCP is focussing its attention on two major impediments to criminal investigations - bank secrecy and the expansion of off-shore centers in providing secure havens for illicit profits derived from drag trafficking and organized crime. Comprehensive studies will be completed later this spring.

It is not easy to counter money laundering, but greater information and working together have been effective. We must continue to help Governments pass stricter banking legislation that will open up the financial system to criminal investigations and crack down on those who could safely hide their illegal profits.

Given the central role of the United Nations, and in particular UNDCP, I hope Member States will ensure matching resources for our new strategies. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said with conviction when he paraphrased Winston Churchill, it truly is a case of "giving us the tools and letting us do the job". Then all of us who care so deeply about a future free from the evils of illegal drugs can go onward from New York with a renewed sense of strength.

After consolidating several functions into the Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, based in Vienna, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Pino Arlacchi, an expert in organized crime, to lead it in repositioning the United Nations to help contain the growing threat posed by transnational networks of drug trafficking, crime, money laundering and terrorism.