Gibraltar News Online

Civil law procedures against crime

Gibraltar Drugs Coordinator John Montegriffo has expressed support for the call by the Attorney General Ricky Rhoda for the introduction of civil procedures for the recovery of assets that are the product of criminal activities.

This idea was first mooted by Attorney General Ricky Rhoda some months ago, during the opening of the legal year when he said that an effective weapon against crime was to take the profit out of crime.

Speaking to the Chronicle, Mr Montegriffo said his office fully backed an initiative of this kind. He said there was a public perception, “which may later turn out to be right or wrong”, and a view in some quarters that more could be done by the authorities to tackle this.

“There is certainly scope for action in Gibraltar. There are enough people driving around flashy cars and wearing spectacular amounts of jewellery [that do raise eyebrows],” he declared.

Under this system a criminal suspect would have to satisfy the investigating authorities that his assets have been lawfully obtained. The mechanism already exists in some European countries, and gives law enforcement agencies greater powers in tracking down and confiscating the proceeds of crime.

In the UK, a non-ministerial Asset Recovery Agency with powers of investigation and confiscation, including proceeds of money laundering, has been active since 2003.

Mr Montegriffo explained that civil proceedings provide law enforcement agencies with a more effective instrument, since in a civil law action conviction can be secured on the balance of probabilities, and not beyond reasonable doubt as is the case in criminal proceedings.

Speaking to the Chronicle, Mr Montegriffo said that moves to enable the seizure of drug traffickers’ assets in Gibraltar was high on his agenda.

“I concur with the views of the Attorney General. Our drugs strategy will have to look at introducing legislation to confiscate the proceeds of drugs money,” he declared. And Mr Montegriffo argues that once these assets are recovered by the authorities, they should be put to good use.

Rather than lost in Government’s treasury, he continued, these proceeds should be channelled back into society in a productive form, whether it be job creation, rehabilitation programmes for drug addicts, or re-directed into improving police equipment and resources.

On the issue of drugs in society, Mr Montegriffo said that as co-ordinator he believed in creating a culture of informed choice rather than just prohibition.

“We have to be more sophisticated than mere enforcement. When I was at school we were visited by a policeman with a cigarette stub hanging from his mouth, who would open a briefcase full of drugs and say ‘this will kill you.’”

As regards the presence of drugs in society, he said there were indicators they monitored, such as the number of related arrests, the quantities of drugs seized, the number of people in rehabilitation, and going through the mental welfare and social services system. He said drug arrests for possession offences had remained relatively static in recent years, although arrests for supplying had gone up.

On the question of rehabilitation he was confident that the local success rate, from the raw data available, was above that of UK centres.

Mr Montegriffo also reviewed some of the measures that his office is pursuing or have already been implemented. These include drug awareness programmes for school children over the age of eight, proposals to tighten up the ban on alcohol sales to minors, mandatory drug tests for prisoners, and the new Misuse of Drugs Ordinance that updated legislation that was three decades behind the times.

Another major project the Drugs Coordinator has embarked on, is the setting up of a working database of statistics related to drug offences in Gibraltar. From the information available, it could be estimated that at least 15% of teenagers between the age of 12 and 18 regularly use drugs.

Mr Montegriffo said that from a world-wide perspective, drugs must be seen as merchandise that is subject to the laws of supply and demand. In this context, Gibraltar was a small branch of much larger international organisations, with a limited market and limited growth for those involved in the ‘business’.

He said the approach to drugs has to be based on an understanding of how the market works, so as to be able to identify and attack the chain of suppliers, distributors and transporters. In a sense illegal drugs was a ‘competitor’ that was acting against the interests of society.

From The Gibraltar Chronicle - The Independent Daily First Published 1801

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