Success Stories

Since 2015, the Central Department for Cooperation and Comparative Law of the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic of Cape Verde has a record of cooperation cases with countries that are part of WACAP namely Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Nigeria.

In January 2015 Cape Verde sent a request for cooperation on crimes of document forgery and money laundering to Guinea-Bissau, through diplomatic channels; at the end of May 2017, in the absence of a response from Guinea-Bissau, Dr. Luís Landim, one of the WACAP Focal Points in Cape Verde at the time, and responsible for judicial cooperation, informally contacted his counterpart in Guinea-Bissau, Dr. Teresa Silva, who in turn intervened with the competent authorities, and the letter was complied with and returned to him in February 2018;

In the judicial year 2015/2016 Cape Verde requested the extradition of 3 (three) Cape Verdean citizens suspected of committing crimes of homicide from Guinea-Bissau; similarly, the intervention of the WACAP focal point, Dr. Teresa Silva, was of paramount importance for the satisfaction of these requests, two of which were concluded in February 2017, with the handing over of two citizens of concern to the Cape Verdean justice system.

Still in that same judicial year, following the request of a Guinea-Bissau national prisoner convicted of a crime of international drug trafficking, Cape Verde formalized a request for the transfer of a convicted person, which with the collaboration of the WACAP focal point, Dr. Teresa Silva, was concluded in January 2019, with the handing over of the convicted person to the Guinea-Bissau authorities.

In February 2017, Cape Verde benefitted, together with Guinea Bissau, from a «Training of Trainers in Adult teaching methodology, the Law and principles of International Cooperation in criminal matters», with the participation of prosecutors and judicial police officials.

Following this training, in March of 2017, four magistrates from Cape Verde ( 3 from the Public Prosecution Service and 1 from the Judiciary) replicated this training to about twenty magistrates from the Public Prosecution Service (8 judicial magistrates and 2 inspectors from the judicial police). According to the evaluation of the trainees, such training was extremely useful for the performance of their duties.

If it is certain that it is not possible for us to quantify the result of this training action, the truth is that after it the number of requests for cooperation that the country sent, which in 2016/2017 was 7 (seven), in 2017/2018 more than tripled to 38 (thirty-eight), although the majority did not have the members of WACAP as their country of destination.  We believe that these figures are at least indirect results of the training in question, which had a very practical side, and had allowed colleagues to demystify the «fear» of formulating a request for cooperation.