Today marked the start of a practical two-day conference organized by Regional Dialogue, with the support of the Supreme Judicial Council, showcasing foreign practice approaches on how to address the challenges of adjudicating complex corruption cases. During the two-day conference, the participants walked through a hypothetical case following standard procedural phases with guidance from international experts, such as Robert Kent Cassibry, a professor at South Carolina School of Law and former Supervisory Assistant Director-Criminal Programs at the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Education, and Magistrate Judge Hon. Lee Dunst, as well as Regional Dialogue experts Goran Klemenčič, Gregory Weddle and Richard Joyce.
"Complex corruption cases in reality don’t involve suitcases full of cash, as we see in the movies, but on the outside look like a normal business," was illustrated by Judge Dunst, about this very vague term. Investigating corruption crimes poses challenges, as noted by Prof. Cassibry: "Complex corruption cases entail more than just intricate schemes and bank transactions; complexity also arises from public pressure stemming from the involvement of public officials." The experts and participants touched upon post factum operations as well. The procedures as evidence, search warrants and investigation scope and the challenges that come with those since most of the work for the investigators happen later on and the risk of evidence destruction is at that point higher, especially when it comes to digital evidence.
On the second day, the participants were joined via Zoom by a Slovenian judge Dr. Ciril Keršmanc, adding to the foreign practices related to dealing with corruption related offences and tools that can help individual judges with tackling the challenges of vast documentation revisions and analysis when dealing both with complex and complicated cases. He encouraged them to be creative when searching for IT-solutions that could help manage these cases and not get caught up in the pursuit of a “perfect” system.
