Title: POLITICS: United Nations Fights Darker Side of Globalisation
By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 (IPS) - The United Nations is gearing itself
to fight the darker side of globalisation: the proliferation of
transnational crimes facilitated by open borders and free market
economies.
Secretary General Kofi Annan says there is an emerging new
"uncivil society" which has jumped on the band wagon of
globalisation purely to establish huge criminal networks cutting
across international borders. The UN, he points out, wants to be
in the forefront of this new battle against organised crime.
Annan will layout the UN's anti-crime plan at the opening Monday
of the Tenth UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime in Vienna,
Austria, Apr. 10-17.
The Secretary General says that open borders - brought about by
globalisation - have made it easier to launder money, traffic in
women and children, and smuggle drugs and arms.
The laws against all of these crimes will be tightened through a
proposed new UN Convention against Transnational Organised
Crime,
to be adopted during the Millennium Summit in September in New
York.
One of the primary areas the UN will focus on is the rise in
computer crimes triggered by the explosive growth of the
information superhighway, the Internet.
Currently, about 200 million people communicate, shop, pay bills
and conduct business through the Internet compared with 26 million
in 1995.
The UN says that this dramatic increase in computer users
worldwide has also spawned a new breed of crooks: "cyber
criminals" who roam the world of cyberspace largely at will,
committing such crimes as unauthorised access or "hacking",
fraud,
computer sabotage, drug trafficking, child pornography and cyber-
stalking.
"Cyber criminals can zoom across international borders undetected,
hide behind countless 'links' or simply vanish, leaving no paper
trail," according to the UN Manual on the Prevention and Control
of Computer-Related Crime.
"Computer criminals are as diverse as the offences they commit.
They may be students, terrorists or memberS of organised crime,"
the manual warns.
For economic crimes, such as fraud or the theft of information,
the biggest offenders are in-house employees, who commit over 90
percent of these offences.
According to recent estimates, consumers lose about 500 million
dollars per year to hackers stealing credit card and calling card
information from online accounts.
Addressing a UN Offshore Forum in the Cayman Islands last week,
UN
Under-Secretary-General Pino Arlacchi said that international
financial crime is not a new phenomenon. But the number of cases
and the amounts involved have now gone beyond what the world
community is prepared to tolerate.
Arlacchi, who is the Executive Director of the UN Office for Drug
Control and Crime Prevention, said a single case of money
laundering in Russia last year involved as much as 10 to 12
billion dollars, illegally obtained and then moved to a New York
bank for laundering.
"Hardly a day now goes without another case appearing in the
press," he said, "Figures in the tens of millions of dollars are
routine. And we are only hearing about those cases that are
caught."
Arlacchi said the single Russian money laundering case involved
a sum which was more than the entire annual gross domestic
product
(GDP) of Jamaica which, he said, was about 9.5 billion dollars in
1997.
"The amounts of money involved have become so large that they are
beginning to have a devastating impact on the economies of whole
countries," he warned.
The case of Nigeria is striking, he said, because the new civilian
government in that country is untangling, one by one, the schemes
and scams that milked billions of dollars from that potentially
rich country and brought its economy to its knees. Much of that
money, he said, found its way abroad to banks that chose not to
ask questions.
During the past decade, he said, technological advances have
simplified money laundering.
In 1995, the US government estimated that 300 million dollars in
laundered funds were being moved every day through electronic
transfers. Given the size of more recent cases, the figure has
increased considerably.
Arlacchi said criminal entrepreneurs have shifted from working in
unconnected regional markets to an increasingly integrated
worldwide market.
He said that with its limited resources, his office is assisting
governments in drafting legislation, training officials and also
advising them on specific cases. (END/IPS/ER/IP/td/da/00)
Origin: SJAAMEX/POLITICS/
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[c] 2000, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS)
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