08/08/2019
Paraguay becomes the first Latin American country to agree to form a specialist multidisciplinary team against corruption, money laundering and economic crime
The signing of the Memorandum of Understanding
02/08/2019
04/03/2019
The agreement has already seen the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the European Union and Paraguayan institutions involved in the fight against economic crime, specifically, the National Police, the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Public Affairs, to form a specialist multidisciplinary team (SMT).
The SMT will be made up of public prosecutors, police and other specialists who will form a single team. Its remit is to give concrete answers to the challenges posed by organised crime, especially given the complexity involved in such investigations. Inter-institutional coordination is to be encouraged with a view to achieving greater effectiveness by means of the multidimensional approach to criminal investigation.
The MoU was signed at the headquarters of the Paraguayan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was attended by, among others, the Minister of the Interior, the State Attorney General, the National Chief of Police, the Commissioner General and the deputy ambassador of the European Union.
The Minister of the Interior stressed the fact international organised crime has increased fivefold in the last four years, thus explaining “the urgent need to seek new formulas to deal with this situation” adding that “our organisational structure remains rooted in the last century. But this is another century and our vision has to change. Crime has moved on”.
For her part, Sandra Quiñónez, the State Attorney General emphasised the importance of setting up the SMT as this “will make it possible to establish lines of action based on cooperation between national organisations in joint action against this crime”.
The agreement was made possible thanks to the collaboration between the Ministry for Public Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior and the coordination of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the national framework of El PAaCTO.
El PAcCTO is a cooperation programme funded by the European Union and managed by FIIAPP and Expertise France in collaboration with the Italo-Latin American Institute and the Camões Institute from Portugal that works to strengthen the fight against organised crime in Latin America.
