This article is the Basel Institute’s contribution to the Global Forum on Law, Justice and Development Review of Legal Experiences and Global Practices Relating to COVID-19, published in December 2021. The Global Forum is an initiative of The World Bank. The contribution was submitted in July 2020; the version below contains minor updates to hyperlinks.

This summary report emerges from the 11th edition of the Lausanne Seminar, held on 2–3 September 2021.

The 11th Lausanne Seminar raised awareness of recent innovations with regard to the use of public-private collaboration to achieve asset recovery outcomes, providing participants with insights and tools for the development of public-private financial information-sharing partnerships in their respective jurisdictions.

This summary also compiles insights identified during the Seminar on:

This in-depth interview with Professor Mark Pieth and Juhani Grossmann, Team Leader - Green Corruption programme at the Basel Institute on Governance, was conducted by Marianne Djupesland and Nina Norset Little of Økokrim, the National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime in Norway.

It covers:

This collection of insights on corruption, the environment and illicit trade emerges from the monthly Corrupting the Environment webinar series between December 2020 and August 2021. 

This report presents findings from a research project entitled Harnessing informality: Designing anti-corruption network interventions and strategic use of legal instruments” funded by UK Aid as part of the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme (GI-ACE).

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) poses a threat to many countries in Africa, Asia, South and Central America. While the role of informal networks in sustaining wildlife trafficking is ever more on the radar of scholars and practitioners, their modus operandi remains largely understudied. The literature tells us that these informal networks play a role in sustaining this illicit cross-border trade.

This article arises from the work of the Basel Institute's Public Governance team on informal governance. It was produced by research partners at the ESCP Business School (Paris) and the EDC Paris Business School (Courbevoie), France.

This case study describes the background, legal strategy and conclusion of a landmark case of non-conviction based confiscation in Peru that has enabled the successful confiscation of around one million dollars linked to terrorist financing.

The case relates to Nelly Marion Evans Risco, a British-Peruvian woman known popularly as “The Nun”. Evans held funds in a bank account in Switzerland that were intended to finance the Shining Path terrorist organisation, whose violent acts in the 1990s were responsible for an estimated 60,000 deaths in Peru.

How effectively does the Business 20 (B20) process channel recommendations on anti-corruption from the business community up to the Group of Twenty (G20) leaders? Are there ways to increase the uptake of B20 recommendations by the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group (ACWG) and in the final Communiqué at the G20 Summit?

This speech was given at a preparatory meeting for the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) against Corruption in 2021.

It deals with non-conviction based confiscation as a method to recover assets stolen through corruption, and how challenges in international cooperation in these cases can and should be overcome.

See Spotlight on non-conviction based confiscation at UNGASS preparatory meeting.