Celebrating Five Years of Innovative Anti-Corruption Training at CEELI

The November 2017 session of the CEELI Institute’s popular program on “Investigating and Prosecuting Official Corruption” was also a milestone, marking five years that the Institute has been offering this innovative training program.  As one UN official recently noted, the course is now considered “the best in Europe.”  Since 2013, more than 300 participants from 16 different countries, ranging from Serbia to Singapore, have completed this program.   Feedback from our participants has remained consistently enthusiastic, and our participants routinely report that their time in Prague is well spent and is beneficial in their professional work.

Participants at this most recent session included prosecutors, investigators, and NGO representatives from Armenia, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, and Ukraine. As always, the five-day interactive program also brought together an extraordinary faculty line-up of some of the world’s foremost anti-corruption prosecutors and forensic accountants, who guided the participants through a case-based, interactive curricula using realistic case scenarios involving complex government procurements.  As part of the program, participants work throughout the week in small groups to develop their own investigation strategy, learning to use time-tested investigative tools along the way. Building on each previous session, participants are presented each day with additional facts, documents, information, and legal obstacles that they must confront and overcome as the evidence and case scenario become more and more complicated. The course is designed to develop and improve practical investigation skills as the participants pursue a resolution to their case, augmented by expert guidance and instruction. The case scenario is supported by relevant faculty presentations on key topics and faculty-provided mentoring to the small groups, as well as to individual participants throughout the program.