Quick guides

High-profile law enforcement operations against illegal wildlife trade (IWT), such as Interpol’s Operation Thunderball in July and the arrest of notorious trafficker Moazu Kromah in Uganda in June 2019, have drawn welcome attention to IWT as a financial and organised crime and not only a conservation issue. Yet in working to strengthen legal frameworks and law enforcement capacity in countries that suffer from high levels of IWT, we must not forget the social drivers and facilitators behind wildlife trafficking – factors that laws alone are powerless to change. This quick guide by Saba Kassa, Public Governance Specialist, draws on a recent Basel Institute Working Paper on Corruption and wildlife trafficking, published in the context of a multi-disciplinary programme of work focused on financial crime in IWT.

This quick guide by Claudia Baez Camargo, Head of Governance Research, draws on Ms Baez Camargo's decades of research on social norms and their implications for anti-corruption practice. She explores: What is a social norm? How do social norms drive and perpetuate corrupt behaviour? The case of health facilities in East Africa How to identify social norms that drive corrupt behaviour What are the implications for anti-corruption practice? And finally: The million-dollar question: how to design anti-corruption interventions to identify social norms that fuel and perpetuate corruption, measure them and tackle them. The guide draws on a more comprehensive blog published on the website of the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence (GI-ACE) research programme.

What does international cooperation mean in the context of asset recovery? This is a wider question than many people think. It also opens up further questions, such as not only how to return more stolen assets more quickly to victim countries, but how those returned assets can best be used to support sustainable development and strengthen criminal justice systems.

Someone once said that the more knowledge is freely shared, the more it grows. Our free eLearning courses on asset tracing, intelligence gathering and financial analysis exemplify this idea. Peter Huppertz, Team Leader IT and eLearning, explains some of the benefits of online courses for financial investigators, analysts and others who need to acquire and practise these complex skills.

Practically every country has a Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and it plays a vital role in combating money laundering and other financial crimes. Yet there is often confusion – even among anti-corruption authorities – about how it works, what it can and can’t do, and what value it brings. Thierry Ravalomanda, Senior Asset Recovery Specialist offers a quick overview.

What is illicit enrichment in a nutshell? What are the benefits for asset recovery? Why is there some controversy?