This Quick Guide explains why effective, transparent and fair management of seized and confiscated assets – including assets linked to sanctions violations – is essential to successful asset recovery. It introduces key principles, standards and practical steps based on international good practice. These include legal, institutional and technical arrangements, that help countries manage seized assets in a way that preserves value, ensures accountability and supports justice.

Despite the increasing use of digital payment methods, cash is still king in many economies – including criminal economies. It remains the most-used payment option across Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, and accounted for over USD 7.6 trillion in consumer expenditures throughout 2022.

That’s a challenge when investigating financial crimes. How can you “follow the money” without records of bank transfers, debit or credit card payments, or digital wallet transactions?

The changing landscape of anti-corruption regulation and enforcement has triggered important discussions around the role of ethics and compliance in business strategies and in the economy as a whole. It has also given impetus to the narrative that anti-corruption compliance programmes are inevitably costly, potentially ineffective and bureaucratic.

Border corruption – defined simply as an illegal exchange between border officials and private actors – is a complex phenomenon with serious impacts on safety, health and security. And stopping it isn’t as easy as just stepping up enforcement.

This quick guide is the second in a two-part series on the tangible yet under-addressed impacts of corruption on security and the complex power dynamics at play.

This second guide goes deeper into a specific security threat: when states use corruption to gain power and influence over other states and even as a geopolitical tool.

How does corruption threaten national and international security, both directly and indirectly? Can viewing it through the lens of power offer deeper insights? And what might we achieve by framing corruption as a security concern?

This quick guide gives a short introduction to this complex issue as part of a two-part series on corruption, security and strategic corruption.

Sexual corruption is a serious and under-recognised form of both corruption and sexual abuse. A particularly harmful form of corruption, it is difficult to measure and prosecute, and can have devastating physical and psychological impacts on survivors/victims.

As it disproportionately affects women and marginalised groups, sexual corruption has an important impact on the advancement of gender equality and minority rights.

Financial intelligence is the staple food of investigations into corruption, money laundering and other financial crimes.

Much financial intelligence is held by private-sector institutions such as banks and other financial service providers. How does that get into the hands of law enforcement, where it can trigger or inform investigations? And how can we improve the system?

To effectively combat organised and financial crime, it is often necessary for countries to establish multi-agency asset recovery task forces, which could also be understood as joint investigation teams/units. The teams are made up of personnel from various agencies in the criminal justice system to effectively investigate financial crime and recover laundered assets.

The relationships between corruption and human rights are complex but cry out for exploring. Could anti-corruption benefit from a human rights perspective? How can the two communities work better together – and what are some risks and challenges?

This Quick Guide gives a brief introduction to the ideas of the Basel Institute’s Vice-President, Professor Anne Peters, and some of our initial work at the intersection of corruption and human rights.