EU-Confiscation System Failure: An Incentive for the Internationalisation of Organized Crime?

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Transcrime ongoing research as partner of the EU project RECOVER (GA 101091375), coordinated by the University of Catania, is showing that between 2021 and 2022 the number of requests of freezing and confiscation among EU countries, pursuant to the Reg. (EU) 2018/1805, ranges between fifty and eighty. This is in stark contrast to the thousands of freezing and confiscation orders taken at a domestic level. The data, which are scarce and collected by the EU Commission in a non-standardized format, pose significant challenges to analysis. A preliminary examination of the available data for 2021 suggests that the European landscape of seizure and confiscation is a failure. If countries are seizing criminal assets at the national level (the Directive 2014/42/EU has had a good impact in approximating national legislations), they are not doing the same when a country requests to another country to seize and confiscate criminal assets abroad.
Is this an incentive to the internationalisation of organized crime? The round table will discuss the data collected by Transcrime in EU Member States answering to this question.

Subtopic

• Topic 5: Social Control and Criminal Justice / Criminal Policy, Criminalization, Policy of Criminal Sanctions (Criminal Law Making Policy WG)

Chair

• Ernesto Savona, Transcrime / Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan)

Discussants

• Matteo Anastasio, Transcrime – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

• Edward Kleemans, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Mike Levi, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University