Stolen Assets Returned, Stolen Rights Unrepaired -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

International asset recovery system celebrates the wrong victory. Governments announce that billions or millions stolen by corruption have been frozen, confiscated or retrieved. Officials shake hands. Banks transfer funds. Headlines declare justice served.

Yet just because money crosses a border does not mean justice crossed with it.

This is not so much about dealing with states abstractly but rather straight up concerning actual victims. They are patients left to die in hospital corridors without medicine, children learning inside crumbling classrooms, families denied access to fresh water, workers deprived of jobs and communities forced to absorb environmental destruction. Public assets are robbed from treasuries, but the consequential deficiency is inflicted on living and breathing human beings.

This is what happens when corrupt officials, corporate middle-folk and professional enablers launder public wealth through shell companies, anonymous trusts and financial secrecy jurisdictions. The definition literally applies wherever proceeds of crime are laundered in foreign jurisdictions, however its most severe implications bear down on poor, heavily indebted and institutionally weak states.

The injustice here starts when the money gets stolen. It goes on in some instances for decades as requested states raise evidentiary technicalities, incompatible confiscation rules, litigation costs or scepticism about the requesting government. Throughout this interlude, financial centres hold sway over wealth siphoned from the poorest societies.

So non-repatriation is no neutral procedural deadlock. It is a persistent violation of human rights.

But unconditional return is not a sufficient condition. Transferring recovered assets to a dark national treasury will only move corruption elsewhere. Funds can vanish into overall budgets, patronage systems, oversubscribed contracts or projects created to make sure political allies are rewarded. Governments recovering legal title, citizens recover nothing.

International law needs to supplant this state-based model in favour of human-rights based asset repatriation. We need answers that the public can rely on, whether it be how money flows, to whom and when funds returned to system, what localities/communities benefit and outcomes tracked.

First, the UN should adopt firm principles setting a stand presumption of prompt repatriation. Requirement for evidence based evidential and reviewable basis for withholding. In the case of states keeping confiscated assets, they must supply specific, based and reviewable reasons before any delays in return. Governance worries should warrant monitored or phased returns not open ended foreign detention.

Second, all return deals should be based on a corruption and human-rights impact assessment that identifies individual, collective, institutional and inter-generational victims Allocation decisions should be finalized only after affected communities participate. When the decision has already been made by officials, consultation is not participatory, it is political theatre.

Third, returned assets can be placed in separate accounts or earmark budget lines. Governments should report on gross numbers, deductions, contracts signed and specific payments made to beneficial owners and ultimate beneficiaries via publicly available dashboards. Funds that cannot be traced cannot honestly be called recovered.

Fourth, you need to have separate financial, procurement and human-rights audits working together. Disbursement rates do not tell the whole story of success. The responsibility lies on the States to prove their progress in relation to health, education, housing, nutrition and food security, water security and sanitation, social protection (including minimum wage), environmental integrity and equality.

Last but not least, the protectors of whistleblowers and journalists as well as auditors and civil society monitors must be put under a timely enforceable provision whilst independent grievance bodies need to provision for investigation into misconduct making it compulsory to suspend suspicious payments, recoup any misused funds and remedy discriminatory allocation.

It is imperative the world stops mixing up asset transfer for social restoration. The relevant question is not how much of it the governments manage to recoup. It is whether the very people Moore robbed of their rights, their power and dignity, are then able to get it back.

Anything less is accounting pretending to be justice.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia