Confiscation and Criminal Assets Recovery—Review of Bosnian Law

Abstract

This paper deals with the legal frameworks in Bosnia and Herzegovina {BiH} for confiscation and criminal assets recovery. It contains proposals for improvement of local laws regulating domestic activities and international judicial cooperation for confiscation and criminal assets recovery. The presentation is in pursuit of two goals: increase the efficiency of confiscation in BiH and intensify international legal contacts of BiH with other countries for the purpose of depriving offenders of their wealth and deter them from committing new crimes. Several legislative proposals are made, namely: abandon the crime-related confiscation and adopt the unexplained wealth confiscation, create two domestic rules: for international sharing of crime-conditioned assets and for confiscation on foreign requests of assets when the conditioning crime is beyond the applicability of the local criminal law. Also, it is argued that BiH is in need of submitting a declaration to European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters and the Second Additional Protocol thereto. This declaration should state that BiH accepts letters rogatory from Parties to the Convention through the EUROJUST channel.