Fight against money laundering in national and international criminal law

As human society developed, developed the awareness of need for protection of the most important goods and values using various measures of social reaction. Money laundering includes a number of different measures and activities undertaken in order to legalize illegally acquired proceeds and conceal their illegal origin. When property is obtained through criminal activities, then its owners seek to find the way to incorporate it in legal financial flow, i.e. to use that money. By incriminating money laundering the state endeavor to protect the economy in whole. Economic crime undermines the economic system of a country. At the moment, the majority of national legal systems put a great deal of effort into fighting against money laundering and related criminal offences. On international level, a number of important documents were adopted in order to specify measures and procedures for fighting against money laundering. The most important, undoubtedly, are the Convention on Money Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime (number 141), adopted on 8th November 1990 in Strasbourg and the Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism, adopted on 3rd May 2005. Criminal offence of money laundering has been, for the first time in Serbia, adopted in the Law on prevention of money laundering, in 2001. Because of the problems emerging related to charges for money laundering especially in those countries demanding criminal offence preceding money laundering to be the probable cause for criminal prosecution for money laundering, in the Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism, there is no longer a need to produce evidence of predicate criminality before charging for money laundering. Concerning this issue, our Criminal Code keeps pace with international documents. The fact that proceeds that are subjects of money laundering derive from predicate criminal offences is to be determined in criminal procedure, for the purpose of particular case of money laundering. In fighting against laundering, prevention has a big role, too. It implies elimination of causes and conditions that influence the development of this phenomenon. Control of money flow, investments and of all the other transactions could, if not completely exterminate, then reduce this phenomenon to minimum.