Vlasic is a senior fellow and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University and a principal at Madison Law & Strategy Group.Vlasic served as a White House Fellow/special assistant to the Secretary of Defense and served on the Slobodan Milosevic and Srebrenica genocide prosecution trial teams at the United Nations war crimes tribunal. Does last month’s conviction of former Liberian President Charles Taylor set precedence for other war criminals? Yes! Taylor is the first major head of state to be convicted by an international tribunal. From this point forward, prosecutors and judges at future head of state trials will look to this case for jurisprudence — and hopefully — current and potential future war criminals will take notice that the impunity so often associated with such crimes is slowly coming to an end.
What are the biggest obstacles encountered when trying to track and retrieve stolen funds? Asset recovery cases are often multi-jurisdictional and complex. Experts employed to work on such matters confront bank secrecy issues. But what is often the greatest challenge to many cases is the sustained political will to see such cases to completion.
Are you optimistic that countries can recover funds from past dictators? Years ago, when ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier of Haiti fled to France, he left with a plane for him and his family and another,reportedly, for much of the excess loot he allegedlyacquiredwhile in power. [Now] the world has a new international organization — the joint United Nations and World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative — that is mandated to help countries with their efforts to recover stolen assets. And that the world’s leaders have supported StAR leads me to believe that we are building the international political will necessary for countries to think “out of the box” in order to find creative solutions to helping recover stolen assets.
— Sara A. Carter
