Peru has taken an important step towards improving integrity in its public administration and the ability of public-sector entities to deliver services to citizens.

Peru’s first National Convention of Prosecutors Specialised in Extinción de Dominio brought together 80 prosecutors, lawyers, police officers and other justice practitioners to share experiences on the application of Peru’s extinción de dominio law.

Extinción de dominio is a form of non-conviction based forfeiture (NBCF) law common in Latin America. It allows the State to confiscate illicit assets where a criminal conviction is not possible in relation to the specific crime generating those assets.

Peru’s non-conviction based confiscation law is a crucial element in the country’s asset recovery toolkit, emphasised the country’s Special General Public Prosecutor, Dr. Daniel Soria Luján, following a three-day training course for 32 Peruvian prosecutors.

The virtual training was focused on Extinción de dominio, the country's non-conviction based confiscation law, whose implementation the Basel Institute is supporting through technical assistance and capacity building.

A newly published Compendium of Jurisprudence on Extinción de Dominio will enable Peruvian judges, prosecutors and other law enforcement actors to assess progress and legal precedents in the implementation of Peru’s 2019 law on non-conviction based confiscation (Extinción de dominio).

More than 860 public officials from 20 cities across Peru have completed a five-week virtual training course of the Subnational Public Finance Management (PFM) Programme, which our Lima-based team implements under the Swiss-Peruvian SECO Cooperation.

A Swiss-funded programme to strengthen public finance management at the local and regional levels in Peru has entered its second phase, with a virtual launch event gathering high-level diplomats and subnational government leaders.

How do you carry out training for 5,000+ public officials across Peru during a pandemic? Our local Public Finance Management team explained how they achieved this at the country’s recent National Innovation Week. The answer: social media and asynchronous communication.

Thanks in part to the unconventional use of social networking tools like Facebook and WhatsApp for distance learning, the training initiative is now snowballing. Joint workshops have been taking place with government ministries and civil society organisations across all regions.

In these times of global crisis, strong and transparent management of public finances is even more essential. How governments manage their money has a real and immediate impact on peoples’ lives. It affects critical issues such as access to education and whether hospitals have enough trained staff and medical equipment.