IN an initial response to the Amsterdam treaty, President Gil Robles said the summit results showed that the present intergovernmental method of revising treaties had reached its limits. In this system of pure intergovernmentalism, the 15 member states negotiate in the light of their electoral and national interests, and in the absence of any delegation speaking for the citizens of the Union. A new system must give the European Parliament full participation in future negotiations and the final say on behalf of all European Union citizens and their global interests.
Meanwhile, it is estimated that £2.4 billion of criminal money is laundered through the City of London annually, and the figure is on the increase. In 1991, the EU passed a directive under which the member states agreed to legislate to enable the proceeds of drugs smuggling and other serious crimes to be seized by the national authorities.
Lawyers, accountants and other professionals are obliged to respect a series of complex regulations designed to enforce the law by, in particular, seeking evidence on the source of financial proceeds. Failure to comply with these provisions in the UK can, in some cases, lead to prison sentences of 14 years.
EUROPOL's remit includes co-ordinating European co-operative action against international money laundering. The question now is how far to extend the powers of EUROPOL by making it "operational" - able to carry out investigations in its own right, rather than relying on the national authorities to work on its behalf.
One idea is to make it an offence under the laws of each member state for anyone to belong to a criminal organisation, irrespective of where it is located. Parliament's President, Jose Maria Gil Robles, has gone one step further and favours a specific EU legal system to deal with fraud against the EU budget. "What we need is a community penal code which could be applied automatically on the territories of the member states, or which is at least compatible with constitutional arrangements and public order provisions in each of the member states."
In the USA, legislation has been introduced to make any offence, committed by a trader dealing in dollars, anywhere in the world, an offence subject to prosecution under US law.
In other words, if a criminal seeks to transfer the dollar proceeds of his crimes to a secret account in Switzerland via a correspondent account in New York, his transaction comes within the jurisdiction of a New York court. In February, 1997, three Venezuelan bankers were convicted of fraudulent conduct in transmitting the proceeds of an international criminal syndicate in this way.