Code of Law

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Financial Times, Sept 18, 1995.

Code to deny the money launderer

The International Bar Association will this week call for
the establishment of a code of practice for lawyers
worldwide to deny criminals access to legal services
which facilitate money laundering.

At the IBA's business law conference in Paris, which
opens today, Professor Ross Harper, IBA president, will
ask representatives from 167 bar associations to pass a
motion supporting efforts to counter money laundering and
for the creation of common professional standards on the
issue.

"We are anxious that there be no safe havens for the
ill-gotten proceeds of criminal activities throughout the
world," he said yesterday. Estimates put the amount of
money laundered worldwide each year at more than 500
billion pounds. On such a scale it is possible for
economies, world trade and global banking to be subverted
by organised crime, the IBA says.

The motion urges member bar associations to press their
national governments to adopt the principal
recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force on
money laundering set up in 1989 by the Group of Seven
industrialised countries and the European Commission. 

Robert Rice, London

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Newsweek, Sept 25, 1995.

A Law of Their Own: Extremists create do-it-yourself
courts.

One day last month Wichita District Attorney Nola
Foulston looked at her copy of the Daily Record, a trade
newspaper, and was stunned to read that she had been
subpoenaed. She was ordered to appear in District Court
and produce her license to practice law. If she failed to
appear, the sheriff would be directed to arrest her. Her
alleged crime: holding public office. The subpoena was an
unofficial document drafted and filed by a local man who
had been charged with a misdemeanor for burning trash
without a permit. Angered by the government interference,
he joined a growing number of disgruntled Americans who
think they've found a better arbiter ofjustice. He went
to a "Common Law court, " one of the latest incarnations
of the extremist right. Foulston ignored the subpoena. "I
don't practice in false courts," she says.

But they're growing. Common Law courts have sprung up in
at least 11 states in the farm belt and the West over the
last year, organized by a cross section of people bent on
directly challenging government. In living rooms, bingo
halls and convention centers, dozens gather weekly to
form juries, present evidence and issue kangaroo-court
indictments, liens, arrest warrants -- and even death
sentences. None of this has the force of law.

The movement is based on a mixture of crackpot conspiracy
theories and bizarre interpretations of the U. S.
Constitution, the Bible and the Magna Charta. In brief,
its leaders preach that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "bank
holiday" edict of 1933, which temporarily shut down the
nation's banks, stripped the country of its safeguards
against tyranny. "When you get to digging into what's
going on today, you have a government operating outside
the Constitution," says David Schechter, a court
organizer.

Court members keep in touch on the Internet, swapping
information, posting meetings and organizing court
sessions . They also vent their views in a Texas magazine
called the AntiShyster. Mostly white men form Common Law
courts; many come from the militia movement. Some are
closely aligned with white-supremacy and anti-Jewish
groups. "The basic idea behind the movement," says
University of Oregon history professor Richard Brown, "is
'popular sovereignty,' that people are above the law.
These people are alienated from the legal system. To some
extent it sounds like they're also trying to settle
personal scores."

Nuisance filings: At times, the movement spills out of
its bogus courts and into real ones. Followers have tied
up courts and IRS offices with thousands of pages of
nuisance filings. Common Law court "marshals" have even
burst into federal courtrooms wearing official-looking
badges and uniforms to serve their papers. Last year in
Garfield County, Mont., 36 men and women formed a Common
Law court and briefly occupied a courthouse. Another
court offered $1 million bounties for the arrest of local
officials and threatened to hang them. Garfield County
Attorney Nick Murnion charged some members of the Common
Law court with "criminal syndicalism," alleging that the
group had advocated acts of violence for political
purposes. One court member was sentenced to 10 years in
prison. Others received smaller sentences.

Some members try to use the rump courts to reverse real
ones. Favorite targets are divorce decrees and
foreclosure notices. "People who don't want to or can't
pay their bills are turning to something that tells them
they don't have to." says Kansas City attorney Berry F.
Laws III, who has been targeted by Common Law courts
because he forecloses on farm mortgages for the Farmers
Home Administration.

This is a serious business, but it has elements of
unintended burlesque. William Ellwood of Columbus. Ohio,
joined up after his small business collapsed and he found
that he still owed the Internal Revenue Service $5,100.
Frustrated and annoyed, he took to researching the
Constitution and concluded that he was living in a land
that infringed on his personal liberty. One thing led to
another until he found himself ticketed by a police
officer for weaving on a highway. His reading of the
Constitution made the ticket null and void. "What we're
saying," he patiently explains, "is the motor-vehicle
laws are laws of commerce. I don't use the laws for
private gain, so why do I have to be stopped?" Ellwood
eventually paid the ticket, but not before he and a small
group of like-minded citizens reached out to organizer
Schechter. Now they meet every Tuesday to have their day
in a court of their own making.

Thomas Heath in Denver and Connie Leslie

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