Mr. Brendan Bruen:

Taking the last point first, this Bill does not say anything about what the substance of sanctions are or on whom sanctions are placed. It does not restrict Ireland's ability to impose sanctions or not to impose sanctions, or to address that substantive question. What the Bill does is it addresses breaches. The CFSP instruments are decided at EU 27 level and are adopted as European regulations. They are directly applicable and they do not require further implementation, from an Irish perspective. However, we are obliged to put in place a criminal justice framework around how to investigate breaches, how to identify assets that are frozen and how to ensure that reporting requirements are abided by and if there is a breach of sanctions, how those are punished and the possibility of confiscation in relation to them. The Bill itself is one step removed from creating a determination. The general scheme of the Bill shows that the offences are dealt with under head 4 to head 12, inclusive. Each of them follows a similar formula, whereby the conduct is in breach of the restrictive measure, the person knows that it is in breach of the restrictive measure and it falls within a particular category of conduct. Therefore, that attracts a certain kind of penalty. That ensures that there is an Irish offence at a particular level that meets this.

From an Irish perspective, we already adopt an all-criminal-offence approach to sanctions' breaches, albeit at a lower level of penalties, under the 1972 Act. That change to something having to be a criminal offence in all cases may have greater relevance elsewhere. It does have relevance for us in terms of the investigative measures that are available for gardaí, ensuring that everything is an arrestable offence, that there are powers of detention and there is the power to do certain things without a warrant. There are also powers in relation to the restraint of assets. The difficulty with asset freezes in general is that the assets themselves are not tainted. In a situation of money laundering, the money is tainted from the very beginning, because it is the proceeds of crime. In an asset freeze situation, the asset is not necessarily tainted. Rather, it is the person who owns the asset who is tainted and it can then be decided that this person cannot do anything with the assets that are linked to them. That requires a somewhat different approach to the powers within it. For example, under section 17 of the money laundering Act, a Garda member at the rank of superintendent can direct a bank account freeze for a period of seven days. That sort of thing is not necessarily available in an asset freeze situation at the moment. It is trying to tie up all of the criminal justice aspects, but it does not-----