French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday proposed using the confiscated assets of drug lords for a United Nations fund to fight the international trade in drugs, such as cocaine, according to dpa. Addressing interior ministers and senior officials from the Group of Eight (G8) nations and other countries particularly affected by the cocaine trade, Sarkozy said such a fund would bolster the drug- fighting efforts of countries with few resources to tackle drug trafficking. Sarkozy's remarks come on the eve of a ministerial-level summit on the transatlantic cocaine trade, being hosted by France, the current president of the G8. "Fighting traffickers is not just about incarcerations or drug seizures. It's about attacking the main cause of trafficking: money," Sarkozy said. "We must deprive drug lords of the proceeds of their crime. We must punish criminals, not only with heavy prison terms, but by also confiscating their assets," he proposed. Apart from the G8 members - the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, Germany, Italy, France and Russia - at least 10 other countries - either cocaine-producing countries such as Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, or countries of transit such as Brazil, Senegal and Morocco - have been invited to the Paris talks. Several multilateral organizations, such as the European Union, the World Bank and international police organization Interpol will also be represented, an Interior Ministry spokeswoman in Paris said. The summit aims to come up with a harmonized approach to tackling drug trafficking, which will be put to a G8 leaders summit in Deauville on May 26 and 27. Noticeably absent from this week's discussions are Venezuela and the West African states of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. Despite being important cocaine transit points, none of the three was invited because France considered them unlikely to sign up to a global plan, Le Monde newspaper reported. The number of cocaine users in Europe doubled from 2 million in 1998 to 4.1 million in 2008, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime last year. By contrast, cocaine use in the United States has fallen sharply on the back of the war on drugs in that country and on drug cartels in neighbouring Mexico. The UNODC has also warned of growing numbers of users in West Africa, which has become a hub for trafficking between Latin America and Europe. In France, Italy and Spain, police can easily freeze the assets of suspected drug lords. In other countries, the procedure is trickier.
