Corruption offences usually flourish in obscurity, often remain untold, are difficult to thoroughly investigate without profound insider information and cause lengthy proceedings. The functional fight against corruption will always depend on the investigation and prosecution based on lawfully collected good-quality evidence. Therefore, law enforcement agencies need means to motivate participants to reveal their knowledge which otherwise would remain undisclosed.
The training session held from 8 to 11 April 2014 in Sarajevo, featuring some 40 participants from all level of law enforcement and criminal justice, inter alia focused on the principal witness regulation.
How to identify a “proper” principal witness? How to appraise the eligibility of a volunteering or potential principal witness? Legal uncertainty for the principal witness? Need for specific protection of a principal witness (public liability)? These were some of the issues discussed using high profile corruption case from Austria presented by experts from the Federal Bureau of Anti-Corruption of the Austrian Ministry of Interior, Stefan Pfandler, Lukas Berghammer and Robert Kalensky.
“This was a follow up to the training organized in December 2013 when the focus was placed on practical aspects of the preparation, planning, and conduct of investigation as well as the best European practices in collection of evidence. The case study we analysed covered all aspects we trained BiH colleagues about so far,” said Karlheinz Gortano, Long Term Expert.
Specialized training sessions that the EU Support to Law Enforcement Project has organised so far were aimed at strengthening the institutional capacity of LEAs and other stakeholders dealing with investigation of corruption issues.
“We can say that the activities we organised have supplied BiH colleagues with the knowledge of the international standards, EU Member States best practices, and guidelines of mechanisms to assess and pursue information related to corruption as well as provide knowledge transfer in investigating, planning, and conducting investigation of this type of crime,” concluded Gortano.
The project “EU Support to Law Enforcement“ which is funded by the EU in the amount of 7 million EUR, from the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA 2010), will continue until 30 April 2014. The project consortium partners include the Ministries of Interior of the Republic of Austria, Republic of Slovenia, Hungary, and of the Land Brandenburg of the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), and Transparency International BiH (as an Associate). Beneficiary partners are BiH law enforcement agencies at state, entity, cantonal and Brčko District BiH level.
