ICAR Asset Recovery Knowledge Centre

The International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) at the Basel Institute on Governance in Basel, Switzerland has been taking steps to address the problem of the lack of easily accessible, comprehensive and practical information on Asset Recovery. This has been identified as one of the key problems by a number of countries at the first meeting of the UNCAC open-ended Working Group on Asset Recovery held in Vienna in August 2007.

ICAR has been working towards establishing an online knowledge centre, dedicated exclusively to Asset Recovery. This first version of the Knowledge Centre, launched recently, consists of the type of information under various categories and for various countries, that we believe will be useful to asset recovery practitioners, investigators, prosecutors and policy makers worldwide.

The Knowledge Centre will house ICAR's own materials, such as training documentation, practical tools and research results, as well as materials from other institutions actively involved in capacity building in Asset Recovery and related fields. There will be direct access to relevant laws of jurisdictions from around the world, international treaties, bilateral treaties on MLA and extradition etc., as well as to court decisions from relevant cases. Furthermore, in collaboration with partner countries and other institutions, the Knowledge Centre will establish an international database of contacts from national institutions or individuals responsible for MLA and asset recovery, and thereby facilitating the direct and easy communication between law enforcement and other public agencies involved in these matters.

This ambitious project is a work in progress. We need your support, cooperation and wisdom to make the information on this website useful, relevant and accurate. We invite you to join us in this effort to create a collaborative, shared knowledge base for the benefit of asset recovery and anti-corruption specialists all over the world. You can use the feedback link to communicate with us and send us your thoughts. We are actively seeking information that we are currently in the process of compiling to present on this knowledge centre, such as relevant legislation, organizations, case studies, asset recovery techniques and lessons learnt. The Knowledge Centre will complement the newly published Asset Recovery Book entitled “Recovering Stolen Assets” (Ed. Mark Pieth, Basel Institute on Governance).