The CEELI Institute Supports Ukrainian War Refugees
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Institute has received a steady stream of requests for assistance from our many colleagues, partners, and friends directly affected by the violence in the country. They are seeking immediate help for family and friends—women, children, and elderly people who are trying to flee from the conflict. In response, the Institute has shifted a significant amount of effort, knowhow, and resources to receive families in Prague at the Villa Grébovka and elsewhere throughout the city. Our priority has been to quickly relocate refugee families to suitable housing and accommodation in or near Prague, providing essentials in the form of food, clothing, and SIM cards, and, later, helping them acclimate to their new lives in Prague. Read more here
Welcoming Julia Fromholz as new Executive Director of the CEELI Institute
The CEELI Institute is delighted to announce the appointment of Julia Fromholz as its new Executive Director, officially taking the reins from Christopher Lehmann on March 28, 2022.
Register for our Large-Scale Online Course on Judicial Case Management!
Building on last year’s successful large-scale online course on digital justice, the CEELI Institute is delighted to announce the launch of a supplemental training for Network members on judicial case management.
Effective case management is critical to ensuring the efficiency and accountability of the judicial system. It facilitates access to justice and helps uphold the right to a fair trial. This online course will address issues of case management, with a focus on the role of the judge, the relevance of effective case management in evaluating judicial performance, a review of resources necessary for efficient case management, and an overview of how technology can assist the process.
Read more here.
CEELI Anti-Corruption Programs for Spring 2022: Conducting Financial Investigations
The CEELI Institute continues its delivery of anti-corruption programs with an active roster of events scheduled throughout Spring 2022. These will include our in-person Conducting Financial Investigations course for investigators and prosecutors in mid-April. This intensive five-day training program covers investigative techniques that can be can be broadly applied by law enforcement to most situations involving financial crimes, including:
- Identifying and locating sources of financial information
- Financial profiling
- Financial interviewing
- Pursuing money laundering, and asset forfeiture
- Drafting financial search warrants
As with all of our anti-corruption programs, this session will combine faculty presentations with practical exercises that use a hypothetical case specially developed for this course. The case study incorporates over 60 documents which participants must use and analyze in conducting their financial investigations. Instructors highlight the differences between an investigation of financial crimes and other criminal investigations, and how those differences affect the investigative techniques that can be applied. Course faculty have decades of hands-on experience working with the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division, and other agencies.
Developing an African Judicial Exchange Network
After an initial roundtable meeting regarding the establishment of an African Judicial Exchange Network in Accra, Ghana and Nairobi, Kenya in November 2021, and an online workshop in January 2022, the CEELI Institute held its third roundtable session in Nairobi, Kenya on April 8-9, 2022. The session brought together judges from The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda who, together with judicial faculty from the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and the United States, discussed good practices on issues of judicial independence and executive interference, remote judging, and case management in courts. The goal of the session was to further develop and expand the foundation for the African Judicial Exchange Network, to continue identifying the needs and topics of common interest to judiciaries of the the participating countries, and to discuss and plan further cooperation. The establishment of the African Judicial Exchange Network is based on the success of the Central and Eastern European Judicial Exchange Network, coordinated by CEELI for the past 10 years, and links between the two networks have already been established.