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Speech by Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe”

Mr Secretary of State for Justice of Monaco,
Mr President of the European Court of Human Rights,
Ministers of Justice, Excellencies,

It was just six months ago that Ministers of Justice from across our 46 member states gathered here in this room for another informal ministerial conference.

That is not a coincidence. It shows how far justice has moved to the centre of Europe’s security agenda.

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The focus then was migration and the European Convention on Human Rights. Few debates are more divisive, or more visible.

Today’s issue often stays out of sight. But it reaches just as deep into the security of our continent.

It is about money. Dirty money. Criminal money. Money that buys what should never be for sale: our democracies.

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Think about what this money actually does.

It sustains organised crime and finances terrorism.

It opens doors. Access to the people and the decisions that are supposed to serve the public.

More and more, this money flows to those who spread disinformation, fuel extremism, and interfere from outside.

Criminal proceeds also do something less obvious.

They spread through the legal economy until the line between clean and dirty money is almost impossible to draw.

Crime stops looking like crime, and starts to pass for business.

None of this brings down a democracy on its own.

That is what makes it hard to see, and even harder to fight.

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But the damage is real. Money laundering accounts for between 2 and 5% of global GDP. Europe alone carries close to a quarter of it.

And it is not just how much. It is also how fast.

Criminals move at the speed of technology. Funds cross borders in seconds. We are still catching up.

They hide the proceeds in virtual assets and channels that did not exist a decade ago.

Armed conflicts and geopolitical tensions keep opening new gaps to exploit.

Now the part that should stay with us: In Europe, less than 2% of the proceeds of crime are ever recovered.

Less than two percent.

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We have a gap.

But we also have something most of the world does not: a shared legal space, built on shared standards. Standards that already address criminal money.

At its heart stands the European Convention on Human Rights. And behind the Convention, the European Court of Human Rights, whose judgments reach into 46 legal systems.

The Convention. The Court. And around them, a system of standards and the monitoring that holds it together. This is the Council of Europe’s common legal space.

It is not imposed from above. It grows from within, inside national law.

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And last month, we made our common legal space stronger.

At the ministerial session in Chișinău, the Council of Europe adopted a new Protocol to its Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism.

The Warsaw Convention was written twenty years ago, for the crime of its time. The new Protocol answers ours.

It modernises how authorities freeze, seize, and confiscate criminal assets, including crypto-assets.

It strengthens cooperation across borders, against networks that have grown more transnational and more sophisticated.

And it holds us to a single principle: no gain in effectiveness at the cost of fundamental rights.

No stronger hand against crime at the cost of an independent justice.

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This is the core of democratic security.

When we trace criminal money, when we recover it, when we keep it out of our institutions, we are not just fighting crime. We are defending democracy.

Democratic security rests on institutions people can trust, on laws that protect everyone equally, on the stability that lets democracy grow.

It is also the capacity for democracies to face financial crime, terrorism, and the threats still to come without losing themselves.

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The threats we face will not be met by any country or any organisation alone. They will be met together, or not at all.

Turning standards into results calls for specialised judges, prosecutors, and investigators.

For the resources and the tools to match the reality of financial crime. For authorities that trust one another and work together, across borders.

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I thank Monaco for convening this informal ministerial early in its presidency of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe.

Thank you all for being here. And I hope to see you in Strasbourg again in October, when the new Protocol opens for signature.

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In a time of rupture, others turn to force.

Europe turns to law. That is our power.
 

Thank you.