These practical guidelines are a set of international good practices intended to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of requesting and requested states in the asset recovery process.

Asset recovery is an intricate and time-consuming process. The guidelines unravel the asset recovery process, breaking it down into practical, manageable guidelines, allowing a targeted audience to focus on the asset recovery process in a comprehensive manner.

This is the report from the Non-State Actors Experts' Meeting, held on 2-3 September 2010 in Laxenburg, Austria. The event was co-organised by the Basel Institute on Governance and the International Anti-Corruption Academy (IACA). Attendance included prominent non-state actors from both developing and developed countries that play and important and active role in the asset recovery processes.

The Basel Institute has been working with the Ministry of Justice of Romania in a two-component project seeking to enhance the capacity of the Romanian authorities to recover the proceeds of crime. The project is being implemented by the Asset Recovery Office (ARO) of the Ministry of Justice in collaboration with the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) of the Basel Institute. Funding of the project has been provided by the Swiss-Romanian Co-operation Programme.

The note evaluates the current legislation on the asset recovery process both at the EU and Member States level, with a view to assessing the need and the feasibility of establishing EU regulation on the use of confiscated assets for civil society and in particular for social purposes.

Corruption is one of the endemic evils in today’s world. The phenomenon has negative impacts on world poverty, democratic governance, progress and development. According to the World Bank, USD 20 to 40 billion is lost annually by developing nations because of corruption. With the adoption of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), the international community aims at setting up a comprehensive global framework to contain and ultimately lower significantly the levels of corruption worldwide.

Street protests in the ‘Arab Spring’ countries have illustrated that public demand for recovering stolen assets has grown exponentially, as have expectations by concerned populations and governments. From a topic discussed in expert forums, it has thus become a topic of the people. The question is: Have practitioners and policy makers delivered on these expectations?

Non-state actors are of fundamental importance in the prevention and combating of corruption within asset recovery processes. Their roles and responsibilities were considered during an experts’ meeting hosted by the Basel Institute on Governance and the International Anti-Corruption Academy in September 2010.

This Working Paper presents findings from a research project that sought to better understand decision-making processes on the return of illegally obtained assets using the examples of past cases of returning assets that had been stolen from Kazakhstan, Peru and the Philippines.

Financial crimes such as corruption, fraud, and embezzlement generate significant profits, often at the expense of the public budget. These proceeds of crime are usually hidden outside of the country where the crime was originally committed, and laundered through complex financial and commercial transactions, often spanning across numerous jurisdictions.

The recovery of stolen assets is a fundamental principle of the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC). By including this element in the said Convention, the international community recognizes the negative impacts on countries and populations deprived of the billions of dollars that are diverted each year by their corrupt leaders and public officials.