I consider this approach  BIS Review 40/2003  1  to be appropriate, as it fosters the desired degree of international standardisation of the rules, yet leaves enough room to take into account the specific features of each country and its legal system. In the macroeconomic policy sphere, the key set of international standards for monetary, financial and fiscal policies are embodied in the Code of Good Practices on Transparency in Monetary and Financial Policies and the Code of Good Practices in Fiscal Transparency, approved in 1999 and 2001 respectively. Among other things, these principles deal with the independence of central banks and financial regulators, restrictions on monetary financing of state budgets, greater transparency of policy-making, and data provision. These ideas have indeed had a marked effect in practice, and the first tentative conclusion is that they have helped to mitigate the international contagion of adverse shocks. In the financial regulatory and supervisory area the work to strengthen international standards has also been very intense. The key pillar here is the Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision, released in 1997. The ongoing work on the Basel Capital Accord, known as Basel II, is a well-known initiative for the future. Transposing all these standards into national legal and regulatory systems has become a key part of the newly founded FSAP, a joint programme of the IMF and the World Bank. In the anti-money-laundering (AML) area, too, the response to the recent challenges has taken the form of more rigorous international standards.

telephone banking and e-finance, has made it necessary to ensure that the identification requirement is observed equally strictly for these transactions, too. Financial institutions are also obliged to store data that can be used for detecting money laundering and as evidence during subsequent legal action. Special units have been established either at existing regulatory authorities or as new public institutions, to which financial intermediaries are obliged to report either suspicious transactions or transactions exceeding some pre-specified volume. Private financial institutions must create their own internal procedures, including a clear division of responsibilities and staff training, in order to implement all the aforementioned duties in practice. As in the other fields of financial regulation, supervisors are paying increasing attention to examining whether such comprehensive procedures and their control mechanisms have been put in place, are functioning appropriately and are responding to new money-laundering practices and other innovations. The AML system in the Czech Republic started to be built in 1996 with the adoption of the Act (No 61/1996 Coll.) Concerning Certain Measures against the Legalisation of Proceeds of Criminal Activity (the “AML Act”), which was subsequently amended in 2000. A draft amendment to the AML Act, which implements the EU’s 2nd AML Directive and also the relevant Special Recommendations of the FATF on combating financing of terrorism, has recently been prepared. The Government has approved this amendment and it is currently being debated in the Czech Parliament.