Peru’s Attorney General, Tomás Gálvez, has established a multidisciplinary Commission to propose comprehensive reform of the country’s non-conviction based forfeiture framework.

The Basel Institute on Governance has been appointed as the Technical Secretariat to the commission, as an extension of our longstanding cooperation with Peru’s Public Prosecutor’s Office (Ministerio Público del Perú).

Non-conviction based forfeiture – in Peru in the form of extinción de dominio legislation – allows the state to recover assets linked to illicit activity outside of criminal proceedings. By preventing criminal wealth from being hidden, transferred or reinvested, it can strengthen asset recovery and help disrupt the financial foundations of organised crime and corruption.

About the Commission

Chaired by the Attorney General, the Commission brings together senior prosecutors and representatives of institutions responsible for financial intelligence, law enforcement, asset recovery, taxation and public registries. It will also hear directly from specialised prosecutors, lawyers, judges and academics about the challenges they face and their proposals for reform.

The Commission will meet twice a week and aims to produce a legislative proposal within three months. Its broad and inclusive approach is designed to deliver legislation that is both effective and respectful of human rights.

Technical assistance for legal reforms

Oscar Solórzano, Head of Latin America for the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery, will serve as the Commission’s Technical Secretariat, together with Deputy Head Walther Delgado.

This is an important opportunity to support a balanced reform that strengthens Peru’s ability to recover illicit assets while upholding due process, protecting legitimately acquired property and reflecting international standards.

These are critical aspects to ensure the law’s legitimacy, as Oscar Solórzano argued in 2024 in a Working Paper: Targeting illicit wealth through non-conviction based forfeiture: Identifying human rights and other standards for Latin America.

Timeline of Peru’s non-conviction based forfeiture law

The journey of Peru’s extinción de dominio framework makes an interesting case study in the development and use of laws designed to help combat corruption and organised crime. The Basel Institute has been closely involved for more than a decade, under programmes of the Swiss SECO-funded Programa GFP Subnacional, whose asset recovery activities are coordinated by Sergio Jiménez Niño, and the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery.

The Peruvian experience provides a concrete example of a non-conviction based confiscation system that, following a period of significant implementation, is now undergoing a process of reassessment and adaptation in response to a substantial legal and political backlash framed largely around constitutional guarantees, due process and the protection of fundamental rights.

The following timeline provides some insight and sets the context for the debates to come:

2018–2023: Building and testing a specialised system

Peru’s current extinción de dominio framework was established by Legislative Decree 1373 in 2018, replacing the previous pérdida de dominio regime with an autonomous, property-based judicial process for recovering assets linked to illicit activity without requiring a prior criminal conviction.

A specialised judicial and prosecutorial system was subsequently established across the country. Over the following years, the framework moved from legislation to practice. Prosecutors and judges developed experience, jurisprudence emerged and institutions worked to harmonise criteria.

The Basel Institute supported this process through training, technical advice, case-based assistance, international cooperation and the development of reference material such as a two-part Compendium of Jurisprudence on Extinción de Dominio. The team also organised national conventions for specialised prosecutors and judges to harmonise understanding and application of the law across Peru.

The system delivered significant results, recovering assets worth well hundreds of millions in US dollars and allowing Peruvian decisions to be recognised and enforced in several cases internationally.

But implementation also brought difficult legal and practical questions to the surface, particularly concerning the autonomy of extinción de dominio from criminal proceedings, property rights, temporal application, evidentiary rules and procedural safeguards.

2024–2025: Constitutional scrutiny and legislative change

In 2024, a constitutional challenge brought by Peru’s Ombudsman placed central elements of Legislative Decree 1373 before the Constitutional Court. At the same time, Congress was considering substantial legislative changes to the system.

The Basel Institute set out technical arguments to inform the discussion, among others in public articles and a series of recorded debates.

In May 2025, Law 32326 substantially amended the framework. The changes affected, among other things, the autonomy and scope of extinción de dominio, evidentiary requirements and limitation periods.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office subsequently challenged the constitutionality of several of those amendments – a pending case that remains relevant to the current reform process.

Then came Judgment 135/2025 of the Constitutional Court. The Court declared parts of the original framework unconstitutional and established binding interpretative criteria on issues including property rights, due process and the relationship between extinción de dominio and criminal proceedings. It ruled, in particular, that Legislative Decree 1373 could only apply to circumstances occurring after its entry into force.

Importantly, the judgment did not bring extinción de dominio to an end. It established constitutional limits that the reform must respect, while also leaving room for legislative choices on important aspects of the system.

2026: From successive changes to comprehensive reform

This is the legal and institutional landscape inherited by the new Commission. It must consider:

• the original architecture of Legislative Decree 1373;
• the amendments introduced by Law 32326;
• the binding constitutional parameters established by Judgment 135/2025; and
• the unresolved constitutional questions concerning the 2025 amendments.

Beyond correcting individual provisions of the law, the Commission must grapple with the question:

What model of non-conviction based forfeiture should Peru have, taking into account its constitutional framework, international standards and the criminal reality the mechanism is intended to address?

Four areas at the heart of the reform

The Commission has organised its work around four thematic areas. Each addresses a set of issues that has emerged from the experience of applying the law, the legislative changes and the Constitutional Court’s judgment.

1. Nature, scope and autonomy What should be the purpose and scope of non-conviction based forfeiture? When should it be available, what assets should it cover and how autonomous should it remain from criminal proceedings? The discussion also concerns its relationship with conviction-based confiscation and other asset recovery mechanisms.
2. Temporal application, legal certainty and protection of rights How should the framework address temporal application and limitation periods while protecting property and fair trial rights, bona fide third parties and victims? What consequences should subsequent criminal decisions have for assets already forfeited?
3. Procedure, evidence and due process What rules are needed for financial investigations, interim measures, burdens and standards of proof, rights of defence and judicial review? These questions go directly to how an effective asset recovery mechanism can operate within clear procedural guarantees.
4. Effectiveness International cooperation, enforcement and asset management. A successful system must also work beyond the courtroom. This area covers international cooperation, recognition and enforcement of foreign decisions, early information exchange, execution of confiscation decisions, management and preservation of assets, restitution and asset sharing, and coordination between the institutions involved in the asset recovery process.

The Commission is addressing these areas progressively. It began in September by listening to specialised extinción de dominio prosecutors from across Peru about the problems encountered in practice and the effects of the legislative reform and the Constitutional Court judgment.

National and international experts are then being invited to examine the different thematic areas before the Commission moves into deliberation and legislative drafting.

Value of a multidisciplinary, participatory approach

This approach is particularly valuable because many of the questions now being examined in Peru are not new.

The autonomy of non-conviction based forfeiture, its relationship with criminal proceedings, retroactivity, property rights, evidentiary standards and due process have historically been among the main grounds on which such systems have been questioned around the world.

What makes the Peruvian experience unusual is the possibility of observing these questions in real time. Rather than examining them retrospectively, the Commission can consider how they have arisen in a mature system, listen to those who have applied the law, hear different legal and institutional perspectives and assess possible solutions while the framework itself is being reconsidered.

In that sense, Peru provides a particularly interesting opportunity to revisit in practice issues that have accompanied non-conviction based forfeiture internationally for decades. These are also central to the Basel Institute’s Working Paper 54: Targeting illicit wealth through non-conviction based forfeiture: Identifying human rights and other standards for Latin America, which examines how effectiveness, human rights, procedural safeguards and international standards can be reconciled in the design and application of these mechanisms.

A reform against the clock

The Commission is working under an exceptionally demanding timeframe. It has only three months to develop a comprehensive proposal on issues involving constitutional rights, criminal policy and the practical effectiveness of asset recovery.

The short deadline reflects a deliberate sense of urgency. After months in which the reform process had largely stalled, Attorney General Tomás Gálvez has decided to use his legislative initiative to move it forward and seek a workable proposal as quickly as possible. Organised crime and illicit economies have not stood still in the meantime, and Peru needs an effective legal framework to target the assets that sustain them.

That urgency is also reflected in the way the Commission is working. It meets twice a week, bringing together specialised prosecutors and national and international experts to examine the four thematic areas, test different approaches and progressively build consensus. The methodology requires intensive legal and comparative analysis, but also negotiation between different institutional perspectives within a highly compressed timeframe.

The task is difficult precisely because both considerations are real: the urgency of strengthening Peru’s response to organised crime, and the need to ensure that the resulting framework is constitutionally sound, effective and sustainable.