"Concealment of Criminal Property" in Iranian Legal Context Compared to French and English Criminal Law Approaches

Concealment and retention of properties resulted from the commission of a crime is an act which in the Romano-Germanic and Common Law systems is more or less subjected to criminalization by legislators of different countries and therefore punishable. This offense which is a kind of mediation in the illegally generated proceeds after successful commission of the crime is a prelude to actually making gains from the property subject of crime and can itself indirectly prepare the ground for encouragement of criminals, giving them the incentives to repeat their offenses. Hence, in an effort to thwart the rational calculations of criminals for selling and making profit out of the illegally acquired properties and objects, and curb its rapid growth and discourage the potential offenders, the legislators with concrete restrictions try to criminalize all sorts of handling such properties, either by the perpetrator of the original crime or by others, and punish the perpetrators. However, while there are the shared views and concordance between the legal system of England as the cradle of the Common Law, the French legal system as the most typical representative of the Romano-Germanic law, and even other legal systems, converging around the idea of “constraining and crackdown of the economic transactions on the properties obtained by crime”, the approaches of different legal systems about the subject and criminalization of concealment of criminal property have tangible differences. Unfortunately the legal system of our country has not been performing well and only in regard to certain offenses, such as theft, criminal procedures have been incompletely introduced. It is obvious that the existing laws, in the current state, lack the adequate preventive potential. This paper, based on the existing theoretical background and the literature on concealment of property obtained by crime, studies this offense in the context of the Iranian legal system with a comparative look at the English and French legal systems through which various aspects of this crime in the three legal systems in terms of their similarities and discrepancies are discussed.