A team of multidisciplinary experts has prepared this “Technical Legislative Report on the Harmonised Classification of Crimes and Investigative Measures to Effectively Combat the Financing of Organised Crime and Corruption in the FOPREL Countries” . It has also benefited from the collaboration of the Central American and Caribbean Judicial Council (CJCC), the Central American and Caribbean Council of Public Prosecutors (CCCMP) and the FOPREL member-country Parliaments.

The text examines the relevant legislation in each FOPREL member state, brings together proposals for the harmonised classification and recording of these crimes, as well as investigative measures to combat them effectively. In addition, the report identifies those elements that foster a disparate, dispersed, duplicated and sometimes incoherent regulatory framework, despite being aimed at very similar contexts.

Collaboration between EL PAcCTO and FOPREL against organised crime

This document has been produced within the framework of the collaboration that EL PAcCTO and FOPREL have been carrying out in recent years, and follows the line of the previously prepared report “Technical Legislative Report on the Harmonised Classification of Environmental Crimes in the Scope of the FOPREL Countries”, which was approved in August 2021. It has also been inspired by the document prepared in 2021 by EL PAcCTO together with the CJCC entitled “Main Challenges Relating to Money Laundering in Central America”, which has motivated the Supreme Court in Costa Rica to recently initiate the procedures to reform the substantive legislation on this subject.

Since the beginning of the Programme, EL PAcCTO has focused its efforts on strengthening international legal cooperation and promoting inter-institutional coordination to strengthen the joint actions of institutions in the criminal chain against organised transnational crime. In this regard, the specific proposals detailed in this report not only support the strengthening of inter-institutional cooperation mechanisms, but also the cooperation between states and they also contribute to generating a regionally solid and coherent criminal response to crimes connected to corruption and criminal finance in the FOPREL countries.