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Diploma courses in gender violence and money laundering for Panamanian judicial officials

Panama, September 21, 2020. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for Central America and the Caribbean, through the Project to Consolidate the Adversarial Criminal Reform in Panama, offers together with the Universidad Latina de Panama a diploma in money laundering and another one in gender violence.

From September 16th to November 10th, 180 officers from the four judicial districts of the Judicial Branch will be trained in both subjects through the virtual modality.


In the opening ceremony of these academic days, the Director of Programs and Operations of UNODC, Melissa Flynn, said that "since 2015, UNODC provides technical assistance and capacity building to all actors involved in the processes of the Accusatory Criminal System, so that their employees have the appropriate tools to perform their work based on ethics, values, independence and knowledge of international conventions, laws and procedures, in an oral system, public and contradictory.


Gender violence is a "crime that has suffered an increase in cases in the country in its various forms, and, as is known, this can lead to criticism from civil society, human rights organizations and experts in the field, who request the attention of the authorities on the correct application of due diligence mechanisms for the investigation and prosecution of cases, in accordance with international conventions such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, to which Panama is a signatory," Flynn emphasized.


Regarding money laundering, the Director of Programs and Operations stated that "organized crime is improving day by day, making the criminal prosecution of these crimes much more complex, trying to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the preventive systems, both of the financial and non-financial infrastructure of the countries, to launder ill-gotten resources". For this reason it is "essential to know the specific roles of the interactors in the preventive and repressive chain of money laundering in the country, to strengthen investigations and generate better decisions, thus showing the effectiveness of the regulations required by international evaluations, all based on the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances; the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Convention against Corruption, of which UNODC is the custodian, and which have allowed to base the international recommendations of the FATF to combat money laundering and standardize the preventive legislation of all countries".