I am a criminal law professor. I think my students would say I'm slightly oriented toward the defence bar on many of these issues, but here's an issue where I think I swing clearly in the other direction. I think that we have to look at the context, as we're always asked to do, with each crime, and here we have to look at the context of the type of crime we're investigating. Here is a type of crime for which there was global knowledge, and one might say global knowledge of just how corrupt this government that we're referring to has been. There are all sorts of evidence, as you referred to, which I think is credible.
One of the mechanisms that certainly is possible is another very interesting and controversial approach that Britain introduced on October 13. They've introduced the very broad Criminal Finances Bill. It's in the legislative process now and being considered.
There are five important initiatives in that bill, all related to money laundering, asset recovery, and that flow of money. One of those initiatives is called an “unexplained wealth order”. If this bill passes, then not every police force, but their designated major crime police forces such as the Serious Fraud Office or their customs office, which investigates these matters, will have the ability to apply to a high court judge to ask for and to have ordered this unexplained wealth order. An example could be when person X is in possession of a $10-million house and there appears to be no apparent explanation of where they got the $10 million.
It is controversial. It will be controversial. It moves in the direction I'm talking about.
I think the burden of proof has to be shifted in a very significant way for persons who are notorious and for regimes that are notorious. Any NGO's assessment on these matters can show just how corrupt a regime has been. I think that giving that regime every due process item that we give to our poorest citizens, who are subject to the power of our state, is really misguided. I think we have to take the exact opposite view, which is that in the face of very strong evidence of corrupt behaviour, we really reverse the process and have them account for their ownership in our country of this property.