Bahamas: Civil Liberties and Privacy — The Question of Balance
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb027135 |
| Pages | 177-180 |
| Published date | 01 February 1997 |
| Date | 01 February 1997 |
| Author | Peter Maynard |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
Journal of Money Laundering Control — Vol. 1 No. 2 — Maynard
Bahamas: Civil Liberties and Privacy — The
Question of Balance
Peter Maynard
A BAHAMIAN PERSPECTIVE
The topic is extremely broad and requires defini-
tions of civil liberties, privacy and balance, which
this short paper will not undertake.1 From age to
age,
the pendulum has swung from, on the one
hand, private property and private rights to, on the
other hand, the powers of the police, and the
public interest in the detection, prevention and
punishment of crime. The experience with privacy
varies from culture to culture. The question of
balance arises, for example, in connection with
search and seizure, the use of improperly obtained
evidence, and the interception of communications.
However, this paper touches on the penetration of
bank secrecy, the Inter-American Convention
against Corruption of the Organization of
American States (OAS), and a number of constitu-
tional principles arising from the cases, especially
the Bahamian case of Carlos Enrique Ledher-Rivas
aka Joe Ledher, a major Colombian drug lord. The
latter case is reported as
International Dutch Resources
v Attorney General [1989] 1 LRB 3572 (the Joe
Ledher
case).
BANK CONFIDENTIALITY
In the customer-banker relationship, there is
privacy, in the sense of confidentiality. But, bank
confidentiality is contractual in nature,3 although it
is reinforced in certain jurisdictions by statutes4
buttressed by criminal sanctions. In any event, it is
clear that banking secrecy is not based on civil
liberties or human rights.
Nevertheless, the penetration of bank secrecy is
accomplished by an increasingly wide variety of
means ranging from, on the one hand, the older
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