I am a regular listener to Radio 4’s Any Questions programme, and always wonder about those panellists who are greeted by a round of applause after their contribution. What must it feel like? Well, now I know. Last week, I was in Vancouver for the International Bar Association’s annual conference. I was a speaker in a session on lawyers’ participation in anti-money laundering legislation, and I made a brief intervention before my turn came to make my own presentation. To my surprise, the crowd of sober lawyers present applauded. Why? I tell myself it is because I told a simple truth.There had been three speakers before I intervened. The first was the chairman of the panel, who showed us statistics for the number of reports by EU lawyers of suspicious transactions in their member states. Aside from the UK, which was in the low thousands, the others were all either in single figures or not far off (for instance, there were nine suspicious transactions reports in Germany in a single year). The second speaker was the president of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) who gave a plain vanilla introduction to their work. And the third was an official from the World Bank’s Financial Market Integrity Unit, who described his research on the kind of large-scale money laundering that takes place globally. At the end of his presentation, which he admitted touched only tangentially on the role of lawyers, he said that his research showed that the overwhelming majority of lawyer participation in money laundering took place by deliberate action of the lawyer, and not through unwitting manipulation by the criminal.

Then I intervened. If that was the case, if money laundering overwhelmingly involves crooked lawyers and not unwitting ones, then why do we have the gigantic and unwieldy money laundering legislation in place for lawyers, with its duty to report suspicious transactions without tipping off the client, which turns the lawyer into a police officer? Obviously, if a lawyer is deliberately involved in the laundering, there are existing laws and professional rules to deal with it. But why must the balance of the rule of law, which depends on a client being able to confide information to a lawyer, be upset for a problem that does not exist? That is when the audience applauded. I regret to say that the chairman of the panel did not stop to debate the question, but hurried on to the next speaker (who happened to be the president of the Law Society, Linda Lee, who gave the position in England and Wales).

I was not making a new point. Lawyers have been asking for evidence of their unwitting involvement in money laundering since the idea of lawyer reporting of suspicious transaction was first mooted. There has been no such research, to my knowledge. The World Bank official let the cat out of the bag when he said his research – on a related subject – had not shown any such involvement. So why continue with the charade? If the largest economy in Europe, Germany, yields only nine reports in a particular year (and I am not sure whether any charges or convictions followed those reports), is it really worth breaching the fundamental right of a citizen to consult a lawyer in confidence for something so tiny that it cannot be seen?

Interestingly, later, after I had spoken at greater length along similar lines, a lawyer from Nigeria said that my views were all very well for developed economies, but that the massive corruption and theft by government officials in his country meant that he felt that lawyers had a duty to report on suspicious transactions – ‘all hands on deck’, as he put it. Did I feel that my views also applied to Nigeria? Yes, I did. Lawyers should not become police officers anywhere – it upsets the balance of functions necessary for the rule of law to work. Another lawyer from Nigeria then intervened to say that the Nigerian Bar had met to discuss this very question, and most members had supported my views.

A discussion followed on what should happen if a lawyer finds out, say, about a threatened murder. Is there then a duty to report? First, though, money laundering – serious as it is – does not of itself endanger life. That is why it is so curious that, of all offences, this is the one in which the law mandates reporting of suspicions. And, second, different countries have different ideas about such reporting: in some it is mandatory if life is endangered; in others it is optional, leaving it to the lawyer to decide whether to report; and in yet others the duty of secrecy is absolute in all circumstances. But with money laundering, the choice has been taken away from lawyers and bars by governments, on the basis of no evidence of a problem of unwitting involvement.

I think it is time to use more of our resources to push for exposure of the lie on which the money laundering legislation is based. There is no evidence that unwitting lawyers’ reports are making any difference. Give us the evidence or repeal the legislation.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), which represents over 700,000 European lawyers through its member bars and law societies

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