Ecuador Department of Justice Grant for Combating Transnational Crime

This project will serve as an implementing mechanism for assessing Ecuador’s justice sector, sharing best practices in judicial and legislative reforms, and providing rapid deployment of INL anti-crime and justice subject matter expertise, training, and technical assistance to facilitate investigating and prosecuting crime, including transnational organized crimes, such as maritime narcotics trafficking and money laundering.  The implementer may look to employ local or regional experts, who are familiar with the Ecuadorian legal system and speak Spanish.  While targeted, efficient assessments will likely be required throughout the course of this project, the primary objective of this project is not a broad assessment.  Proposed activities should focus on capacity-building assistance.

This project consists of four major components:

Component I – Institutional Development and Capacity Building for Justice Sector Transnational Organized Crime Units:  Project will assess current judicial and legislative needs to build the efficiency of the judicial sector and increase capacity of investigators, prosecutors, and judges to prosecute multi-faceted transnational crimes.  Project will provide rapid deployments, training, and technical expertise, among other capacity-building tools.

Component II – Financial Crimes Project:  Project will provide technical assistance,training, and advisement to advance asset recovery and management, anti-money laundering,and additional financial crime lines of effort as appropriate.  Rapid deployment sub-projects may be required based on emerging needs and new requests from the Ecuadorian government.

Component III – Maritime Crime Project:  Project will build justice sector competencies to address maritime crime, with a focus on building prosecutorial capacity to combat illicit trafficking and smuggling across Ecuador’s criminal justice and security systems.  

Component IV – Embedded Advisors: Project will supply at least one subject matter expert (SME) advisor to be embedded with an Ecuadorian government institution, potentially the Attorney General’s Office, to provide capacity building assistance in a hands-on mentoring atmosphere.  INL, based upon information obtained and provided by the implementer, will identify the subject area from Components I-III for which an embedded SME advisor will provided to the Ecuadorian government.