Colombia, the host country for the General Assembly of the Ibero-American Association of Public Ministries

• In Colombia, representatives of 20 Public Ministries and Prosecutor’s Offices hold a meeting
• At the meeting, strategies to strengthen the fight against organized crime and its finances, money laundering, migrant smuggling, drug trafficking, and behaviors that affect natural resources, among other transnational crimes will be addressed

With the presence of the representatives of the public ministries and prosecutor´s  offices of Ibero-America, the XXIX General Assembly of the Ibero-American Association of Public Ministries (Asamblea General de la Asociación Iberoamericana de Ministerios Públicos AIAMP) began in Colombia.

“This meeting is a great opportunity to consolidate prompt and secure communication channels that allow us to act in an efficient and coordinated manner. I firmly believe that international judicial cooperation, the exchange of experiences, good practices, the search for joint investigation formulas, and the implementation of technological tools are fundamental for our continent”, said the Colombian Attorney General, Francisco Barbosa Delgado as the host.

For his part, the Attorney of Chile, Jorge Abbott Charme, current president of the AIAMP, stressed that: “today more than ever we will continue investigating and criminally prosecuting all those who commit crimes, we will continue providing protection and assistance to victims and witnesses and also to our prosecutors, we will do so with the full right of guarantees (…) and with the same conviction as always to serve our communities. This meeting is held in an environment of the highest technical level, the greatest fraternity, and, above all, with the vocation for public service that characterizes the institutions, their prosecutors, and officials”.

At the beginning of the meeting, the participants paid tribute to the prosecutors who have lost their lives in the performance of their duties.

“The determined commitment of the Ibero-American prosecutors’ Offices in defending the social rule of law, the protection of victims and vulnerable people, demands a firm condemnation of any attack on life, integrity, and also freedom. There are threats and all kinds of difficulties that we have to face daily, especially the prosecutors who are devoted to the fight against organized crime”, highlighted Francisco Jiménez-Villarejo Fernández, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Cooperation Unit of Spain and representative of the Permanent General Secretariat of the AIAMP.

Agenda

The different networks and working groups will present documents for the consideration of the assembly in terms of gender violence, organized crime, inter-institutional cooperation, the fight against environmental crimes, asset forfeiture, confiscation, asset recovery, and restorative criminal justice. The aforementioned documents constitute guides, diagnoses, and good practices to strengthen the performance of public ministries and prosecutors in the region

During the day, the representatives of the public ministries and prosecutors will discuss the security of Latin American prosecutors and will discuss the need to form a group in the AIAMP to do a follow-up.

Strategic partners such as El PAcCTO, the Conference of Ministers of Justice of Ibero-American Countries (Conferencia de Ministros de Justicia de los Países Iberoamericanos COMJIB), the Ibero-American Network of International Legal Cooperation (Red Iberoamericana de Cooperación Jurídica Internacional  IberRed), the Ibero-American Judicial Summit (Cumbre Judicial Iberoamericana  CIJ), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC), the United Nations Latin American Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders  (ILANUD), Eurosocial+, Eurojust and the Center for International Cooperation of New York University.

About AIAMP

The AIAMP is an entity made up of 22 public ministries and prosecutors from Ibero-America, which seeks to develop common strategies to deal with the main crimes that affect different countries. It promotes the exchange of knowledge and good practices, technical cooperation, and technology transfer among its members; in addition to the development of joint strategies to fight transnational crime in a coordinated manner.

Likewise, it consolidates international cooperation ties to speed up and make more effective the procedures related to obtaining evidence in criminal proceedings. The AIAMP has specialized networks and working groups on issues such as human trafficking and migrant smuggling, cybercrime, drug trafficking, corruption, international criminal cooperation, environmental protection, and gender.

The AIAMP is made up of the public ministries and prosecutors of Andorra, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

The information contained in this press release corresponds to the narration of the objective news provided by the officials in charge of carrying out criminal investigations within the Office of the Attorney General. By the time this communication is disclosed, the legal status of the people mentioned is still pending to be resolved by the competent judicial authority, always under the presumption of innocence contemplated by Article 29 of the Political Constitution and Article 7 of Law 906 of 2004.