A/HRC/36/52 countries of origin. The international community must struggle to curb predatory financial practices which lead to human rights violations and contribute to erosion of the rule of law. 79. The Advisory Committee of the Human Rights Council recommends that Member States: (a) Ensure the prompt and unconditional repatriation of funds of illicit origin to the countries of origin. A renewed, decisive and pro-active global commitment is needed to tackle the phenomenon of illicit financial flows and their ensuing negative impact on human rights and the right to development. States must take urgent action to push forward the procedures aimed at the recovery of stolen assets. They must adopt all measures needed to prevent the plundering of public assets to the benefit of private individuals or entities. Corruption and other practices that tend to maximize profits by circumventing the spirit of the law must be curtailed. Policies to end corruption and money-laundering must be decisive, and preventive measures must be effective and implemented in practice; (b) Ensure that the crimes that are at the origin of illicit financial flows and grand corruption are adequately sanctioned and do not remain unpunished or subject to statutes of limitation. Impunity for those who systematically and massively plunder public resources is unacceptable. Those responsible for grand corruption must be held accountable and amnesty laws should not be misused to avoid justice. Under certain circumstances, financial crimes with transnational implications should be prosecuted at the international level and not be subject to statutes of limitation. States should consider ways to characterize as punishable international crimes, i.e., as crimes against humanity, acts of corruption that are carried out systematically and have a genuine impact on the social and economic well-being of the population, i.e., acts that lead to the dismantling of social services, thereby hindering economic and social progress; (c) Ensure that the banks and financial intermediaries involved, notably those specialized in asset management, are held accountable for their involvement in illicit financial flows. States must urgently ensure that banks and other financial intermediaries operating in their jurisdiction conduct their business with due diligence. States should monitor their compliance with all preventive measures envisaged at the national level effectively and hold banks and banks managers accountable in cases of violation. Criminal sanctions must be envisaged and they must be proportional to the gravity of the case. States must ensure that financial intermediaries proactively take actions to fight corruption and money-laundering. Banks must provide proof of the actions that are being taken to avoid “dirty money”. States must ensure that regulatory authorities undertake all necessary measures to guarantee banks’ due diligence and accountability and that those measures are implemented in practice; the authorities must also effectively demonstrate impartiality and independence in their functioning; (d) Support the suppression of tax havens and the regulation of offshore companies. The problematic surrounding asset recovery processes should be addressed as part of a broader international dialogue on the reform of the international financial system. States should actively support global initiatives aimed at curtailing those practices in the financial sector that favour illicit financial flows. More specifically, they must join the struggle undertaken by OECD against tax havens and offshore companies by supporting the setting up of a publicly available international register of offshore companies; prohibiting anonymous shares in limited liability companies; and making the ultimate beneficiary nominee of shares publicly known; (e) Support action by the Security Council on the freezing of illicit financial flows and encourage the extension of similar measures to other cases. Council resolutions 2140 (2014) and 2216 (2015) on the situation in Yemen, by means of which individuals or entities designated by the 2140 Sanctions Committee are listed and sanctioned, are particularly welcome. Analogous measures should be considered in 19

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