Justice wants to fight organized crime much harder. Taking money from criminals is an important part of that. Justice wants to combat subversive crime more effectively by making it easier and faster to seize criminal money and goods.
A new law should make that possible. The bottom line is that the police can already take money and property without a criminal having already been convicted. Now the police often have to wait until it is proven that it is criminal money.
With the current Plukze legislation, it is not possible to take criminal money without someone having been convicted. To make all this possible, former minister Grapperhaus submitted a bill in 2020, which is still being discussed in the courts. The law has therefore not yet come into effect.
When the new law goes into effect, the money can be taken immediately and a suspect must then prove that it is not criminal money. The Ministry of Justice believes that the confiscation of criminal assets should be a more important part of tackling organized subversive crime, and the new law is urgently needed.
Not only does it make it more difficult for criminals to earn money quickly, it also helps to prevent criminal investments in further illegal practices. Moreover, criminals with their criminal money are prevented from corrupting the legal economy and thus undermining society.
‘We are not only after their wealth, their luxury villas, expensive watches, cars and yachts. We also directly affect them in their criminal business,’ said Grapperhaus after the bill was launched.
2022
Now, almost two years after the bill was submitted, it remains to be seen whether the law will come in this form at all. There is still a lot of opposition to the new law. This is partly because lawyers have fought fiercely against the new law from the start.
It now appears that not only lawyers, but also judges agree with this. Judges also believe that the law in its current form goes too far. The Council for the Judiciary called the bill ‘undesirable’. The institution fears that this will be at the expense of legal protection.
The highest governing body for the judicial organizations says in a published opinion that the proposed way to seize and seize money and goods through a new civil procedure will be at the expense of legal protection. The judges seem to be in line with the legal profession, which has previously been critical of the bill.
‘These civil proceedings can be used to circumvent criminal guarantees. This can also lead to the underlying crime not being tackled’, the Council writes to the minister to Minister Yesilgöz (Justice & Security).
The judges believe that the judiciary is given too much room to fill in a lot itself, without sufficient guarantees. The judges recommend amending the law and providing judges with more room to maneuver so that they can play an active role.
‘The civil court must be able to assess whether the public prosecutor has rightly chosen to initiate the civil procedure. The public prosecutor will have to provide the information on the basis of which the judge can assess this’, according to the Council in its advice.
It is now the turn of the Ministry of Justice to respond to the objections and possibly amend the law. For the time being, the judiciary cannot take criminal money more easily.
