From October 11 to 16, the attorney general of Colombia, Francisco Barbosa, will be touring different countries of the European continent with the aim of, as explained by international media such as Efe Agency, to strengthen international cooperation against crime and meet with Michelle Bacehelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. As reported by the office, there will be “different meetings on international cooperation, human rights defenders and the fight against organized crime, among other issues.”
On October 11, the first day of the plan scheduled for Barbosa, the prosecutor will meet, in Paris, with the director of the French Judicial Police, Jérôme Bonet. In the same way, on October 13, Barbosa will be in the company of the chairman of the Board of Prosecutors General, Gerrit Van der Burg, and with the head of the Central Unit of the Netherlands National Police, Jannine van den Berg, in Amsterdam. Two days later, on October 15, Barbosa will hold his last meeting, also in Amsterdam, with Bachelet.
It was in recent days when the Attorney General of the Nation participated in the ‘XVII National and International Meeting of the Business Security Front’, in the Cultural Center of the General Santander Cadet School, located in the south of Bogotá. There, the official stressed that, in his opinion, the work of the entity he commands has been forceful, even he assured that the country’s Prosecutor’s Office is the most solid in Latin America. “Since the beginning of my term, I have been to 120 places in the national territory, visiting all the departments of the country more than three times. We are the most solid Attorney General of the Nation in this continent, above the Mexican and the Brazilian. It is a prosecutor’s office built on very complex pillars ”, he pointed out.
According to the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office, the collaboration with the Netherlands and France has been positive, since, after different efforts, positive results have been delivered, consistent with the collective work. Among the crimes that have been hit, from different angles, there are money laundering, tax fraud and illicit enrichment. In this sense, explains the national entity, 11 judicial assistance from the Netherlands and five from France have been processed.
“In terms of money laundering, 17 structural investigations are carried out associated with criminal organizations with interference in the Netherlands and 4 investigations with some connection with France (…) Extinction procedures are advancing, in the initial phase, of assets that would be linked to criminal typologies, directly and indirectly related to France (…) structural domain extinction procedures, in which assets are investigated whose illicit origin is linked to the deployment of criminal activities related to the Netherlands “, says the office.
On the other hand, and according to what was stated by the Prosecutor’s Office, between January 1, 2015 and September 14, 2021, France has requested and 14 of its citizens have been captured in Colombia.
“My management has been very successful. We have united the entity in all the territories of this country. I have carried out management tasks with the management team in 120 official assignments. There are no first or second category territories in this Office. All have been treated with respect. In our lines of action, we have achieved historical clarification rates regarding homicides of social leaders, going from 52% to 66.43%; in reincorporated persons, from 40% to 53.25%; in collective homicides, from 44.08% to 74%, and intentional homicide is at a historical level of 32.47%. Our rate of effectiveness in citizen security in the face of the request for insurance measures stands at 82% ”, the Prosecutor stressed in an interview with Yamid Amat, for the newspaper El Tiempo.
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