Financial crime
News & Blog
26 Jun 2025
BlogNot just for lawyers: learning your way into anti-corruption
6 Sep 2021
News11th Lausanne Seminar spotlights public-private collaboration for asset recovery
Asset Recovery
20 Nov 2020
NewsGlobal Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptocurrencies closes with 7 key recommendations for fighting crypto-enabled crime
Anti-Money Laundering, Asset Recovery
Publications
Working Paper 54: Targeting illicit wealth through non-conviction based forfeiture: Identifying human rights and other standards for Latin America
This Working Paper explores the wide variety of non-conviction based (NCB) forfeiture laws in Latin America, with a special focus on the region’s predominant model, Extinción de dominio.
It argues that NCB forfeiture legislation, which allows for the recovery of stolen assets outside of criminal proceedings, can contribute significantly to a state’s criminal policy response to rampant economic and organised crime.
The paper emphasises the importance of critically reviewing and harmonising domestic practices of NCB forfeiture around emerging standards, so that they can reach their large potential in asset recovery. Ensuring their alignment with international human rights and other recognised norms and procedural rules ultimately builds trust, lends legitimacy and fosters judicial cooperation in international NCB forfeiture cases.
About this report
The paper is based on experience gained through the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR), which since 2006 has supported partner countries in investigating, prosecuting and recovering assets arising from grand corruption and other crimes.
This paper is published as part of the Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper series, ISSN: 2624-9650. You may share or republish the Working Paper under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Suggested citation: Solórzano, Oscar. 2024. ‘Targeting illicit wealth through non-conviction based forfeiture: Identifying human rights and other standards for Latin America.’ Working Paper 54, Basel Institute on Governance. Available at: baselgovernance.org/publications/wp-54.
Understanding Terrorist Finance
Understanding Terrorist Finance provides powerful new insights into the financial and economic realities of terrorist groups. Dispelling popular myths, the book presents the first unified coherent framework for the systematic analysis of terrorist finance and includes empirical studies of the financing of groups in Europe, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.
Wittig finds that the activities typically represented as ‘terrorist finance’, such as donations, criminal activities and weapons procurement, ought to be understood in terms of how terrorist groups – as socio-political actors – access and interact with flows of economic value rather than as elements of an illicit financial edifice supposedly underpinning global terrorism.
The book represents a significant contribution to both research and practice.
