Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 21 June 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

Proceeds of Crime (Gross Human Rights Abuses) Bill 2020: Discussion

Photo of James LawlessJames Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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I will broaden out the contributions and invite the other witnesses to comment. The difficulty, as it has been put to us, is that there may be assets within the jurisdiction generated by what are called existing crimes, shall we say, or more common or garden crimes, as opposed to human rights crimes. Assets in those cases are already subject to the laws of the State and to seizure by CAB and similar agencies. We may then have another scenario where a human rights abuser is resident in a different country but who happens to hold assets in this jurisdiction. Our question in that scenario, which would appear to be the category at which this legislation is directed, is how we can be sure that those assets were generated or that wealth was created through activity involving human rights abuse. Is this the central difficulty?