THREE applications have been made under the Criminal Justice Act 1994 to freeze bank accounts of suspected criminals, according to a High Court judge, Mr Justice Carney.
The judge told the International Bar Association conference in Dublin that "two orders had lapsed and one survived".
Mr Justice Carney said it was regrettable that one such hearing had had to be private, "because it meant the community is not being alerted to the fact that something is being done and the proceeds of drug traffickers are being seized in this country".
Ireland implemented an EU directive on money laundering with the Act in 1994. It enables courts to seize proceeds of drug trafficking and other serious offences. Financial institutions must take "reasonable measures" to establish the identity of clients who carry out substantial transactions, or a third party if their client is acting for such a party.
Mr Justice Carney said the Act enabled Ireland to co operate with other states in the criminal field. The conference, called "Borderless Crimes and Criminal Organisations", was told about the international and increasingly sophisticated nature of drug trafficking and money laundering.
The chief of the drug division in a US state attorney's office, Mr Wilmer Parker, described how the US government set up a sting operation in order to penetrate a Colombian cocaine cartel. With the co operation of the British Foreign Office and Scotland Yard they set up a bank in Anguilla, a British controlled island in the Bahamas.
They advertised the bank as "an exclusive private bank, staffed by elite professionals" and recruited managers from the collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The bank was chartered in 1994 and the amount of money that flowed through it was "staggering".
"How do we know that the monies were drug proceeds? Well their owners told us . . . We began hearing things directly from investors that involved not just movement of wealth but their criminal conduct in Europe and beyond."
They discovered that the cartel had links with the Italian Mafia and was shipping arms to Bosnia. "We were in the belly of the beast," Mr Parker said. The operation was finally wound up.
"We were never discovered, in terms of being detected by members of organised crime. Our superiors in Washington became quite concerned about what we were being asked to do."
The director of the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, (UNICRI), Mr Herman Woltring, said the UN had no compulsory powers to prevent international crime. "There is no supranational body capable of investigating breaches of UN models, prosecuting and imposing penalties."