Car thefts: putting on the brakes.

Throughout the world, the theft and resale of automobiles and other vehicles are fast becoming big business for organized criminals, and the United Nations is urgently seeking to shore up some of the key loopholes that are enabling this illicit enterprise to mushroom. This was the focus of the International Conference on Illicit Trafficking in Stolen Vehicles, held in Warsaw, Poland, in December. The present boom in international car theft poses a number of daunting obstacles for law enforcement agencies - lack of centralized data, inadequate record-keeping requirements on stolen vehicles and vehicle registrations in general, cumbersome international recovery procedures, and too lenient legislation covering the activities of professional car thieves or "couriers".

For example, the number of cars stolen annually in France rose from 2,507 in 1950 to 143,608 in 1975 and on to 312,009 in 1992. In Belgium, it skyrocketed from 9,482 in 1986 to 31,313 in 1992. According to a news report, car thefts in Costa Rica have increased from 2,027 in 1993 to 3,400 in 1995.

A major recent change in stolen vehicle trends is the entry on the scene of a multiplicity of criminal gangs - sometimes in collaboration across frontiers - who are devising elaborate and sophisticated schemes for systematically smuggling stolen vehicles to far-flung destinations. Often, the systems are set up so that the used-car customer in the destination country believes he or she is making a legitimate purchase.

There are a great number of factors and loopholes in legislation, and the activities of the authorities contribute to the explosion in illicit trafficking in motor vehicles, including the slowness of exchange of data on the status of vehicle ownership. Existing registration provisions are found to be ineffective, and there is no systematic control for adherence to those...