The Legal Assistance Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean five years on

The HQ-based Legal Assistance Programme decentralized five years ago. Now it has three satellite offices around the world. Here is the Latin American and Caribbean story.

Five years ago, UNODC's Legal Assistance Programme (LAP) decided to take its global business closer to its clients, setting up the Legal Assistance Programme in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAPLAP). By decentralizing its operation, LAP hoped to service more states better. LAPLAC is, hopefully, doing just that.

This Colombia-based programme soon realized that in order to establish itself as a truly regional programme it had to be in a position to offer legal advisory services relevant to most jurisdictions in the region. Even before the conventions against transnational organized crime and corruption entered into force, LAPLAC therefore decided to concentrate its efforts on the thematic areas common to all the conventions (e.g. mutual legal assistance, special investigation techniques, money laundering and confiscation) while promoting cooperation between states which of course is the explicit purpose of these multilateral treaties. In addition, the programme continues to supply ad-hoc assistance as needed.

Taking into account the stage of development of UNODC's Drug Programme, LAPLAC also made the decision to focus on capacity-building, delivering UNODC-developed cutting-edge tools to its beneficiaries. In this way, the programme has over time responded to its client states' repeated requests for more realistic and relevant training.

It was finally deemed necessary and desirable to work closely together with internal and external partners such as the Global Programme against Money Laundering (GPML) and the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD). Many LAPLAC activities are now carried out as joint-ventures with one partner or another, thus optimizing financial and technical resources. These strategic alliances, which include emerging contacts with the private sector, further ensure coordination for the benefit of target countries and the donor community.

If LAPLAC's fifth full year of operations is any indication, this three-legged approach has slowly but surely produced the expected results and synergies. The demand for the programme's services is sharply up. In 2005 alone, more than a thousand investigators, prosecutors, judges etc. were involved in different initiatives region-wide. The programme has likewise had the good fortune to attract increasing funds, at the local and regional levels, that supplement LAP's faithful contributors.

Today, LAPLAC is able to deliver a package of innovate capacity-building tools, including its own case-management tool and mock trial programme, LAP's mutual legal assistance request writer software, GPML's computer based training/anti-money laundering, and several other practical working tools are in the making. All in all, LAP's decentralization experiment or model must be said to be paying off.

Under the motto 'We're no better than our next piece of advice', LAPLAC is looking forward to the coming five years. 2006 is off to a promising start. Donors like the Interior Ministry of Spain, the Foreign Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom and the State Department of the United States of America have rallied around the programme on an unprecedented scale, some for the first time. Encouraged by their support, LAPLAC is determined to service even more states even better, providing good value for money