Background
Within OPDAT’s Africa Region, experienced Resident Legal Advisors (RLAs) and Intermittent Legal Advisors (ILAs) provide advice and technical assistance to prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement officers, and related justice sector personnel in the region to improve their ability to investigate, prosecute, and adjudicate criminal cases involving more complex, transnational, organized crime, including terrorism, terror financing, money laundering, and the illicit trafficking of arms, weapons of mass destruction, and wildlife. These programs are primarily funded by the U.S. Department of State.
Overview and Current Focus
The scourge of terrorism has hit numerous countries throughout Africa, killing and maiming thousands of innocents, causing millions to flee their homes, creating further instability in fragile areas and threatening U.S. interests and alliances. At the same time, many countries in Africa seek assistance combatting other transnational criminal threats and to overcome the historical neglect of justice sector institutions. In some countries, legislation is antiquated and inadequate to support modern criminal justice practices. While in other countries, legislation may be robust, but policies, procedures and practices are dated or function poorly.
The Department of Justice and OPDAT programs seek to provide immediate and relevant technical assistance to our African partners to permit them to respond to current threats in a manner that supports sustainable improvements in justice sector institutions and promotes the rule of law. Many of our programs are designed to support fundamental changes that are consistent with modern, international norms of criminal investigation, prosecution and adjudication.
In West Africa, for example, OPDAT has emphasized the need for proactive investigations and prosecutions that rely on closer collaboration between police, gendarmerie, and investigating magistrates. In some countries, this has included support for counterterrorism task forces, interdisciplinary training on investigating terrorist organizations and terrorism financing, and the promotion of formal and informal cross-border collaboration among countries in the region.
In both West and East Africa, we have provided career USDOJ prosecutors, supported by seasoned U.S. law enforcement personnel, to act as resources and mentors to assist our counterparts investigate and prosecute terrorists following some of the larger terrorist incidents on the continent. In addition, our prosecutors have worked alongside our foreign counterparts as they develop better processes for dealing with the backlog of detained terrorist suspects.
OPDAT has coordinated with our U.S. interagency colleagues, including with the Department of Defense and U.S. Africa Command, to assist our partners develop better cooperation between civilian and military authorities pursuing the fight against terrorist organizations operating in their countries.
Across the continent, we also offer our expertise and support for counter narcotics efforts. RLAs, in collaboration with the DEA and others, implement programs to enhance our partners’ abilities not only to prosecute simpler drug cases, but to pursue large scale cases against international traffickers who use these countries as transit hubs.
These strategies place a premium on building the Rule of Law, pursuing threats to their source, and working with African partners to improve the ability of their security services to counter terrorism, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and the illegal trade in arms and natural resources. In Benin and Togo, the RLA program assisted those countries to develop their first narcotics investigation and prosecution manuals that set forth the laws, policies and practices for pursuing more complex narcotics cases. The RLA then organized country-wide training for investigators and prosecutors on using the content of the manuals to help guide their pursuit of current and future narcotics cases.
In several countries, OPDAT has been focused on helping our partners improve policies and practices that have heretofore led to excessive pretrial detention of arrested suspects. In many countries, the pretrial population of persons held in prison exceeds 60%; many of those detailed are juveniles. In too many cases the authorities do not have sufficient evidence to prosecute those detained. Nevertheless, these individuals are held for months or years without trial. OPDAT has committed to assisting these countries to rediscover their existing legal mechanisms and develop new tools to reduce excessive detention.
Reductions in unnecessary detention will have cascading benefits throughout the system, reducing overcrowding in the prisons and limiting exposure of vulnerable detainees to violent extremist rhetoric in those prisons, and reducing caseloads to permit police, prosecutors, and judges to focus on fewer and more important cases. In countries like Kenya and Ghana, our support for targeted programs to reduce overcrowding have not only seen immediate reductions in pretrial detention, but the focus and processes have assisted our foreign colleagues to better understand the mechanisms that have been causing the problems and to work together to solve those problems. Our support for regional programs, as well as professional exchanges as was done between Ghana and Kenya, have assisted these countries to share their experiences and solutions.
Part of our effort to support regional information sharing and training has included our RLA program at the International Institute for Justice and Rule of Law (IIJ) located in Malta, where the RLA has been designing and delivering training curriculum to a wide range of justice sector personnel in Africa and the Middle East. The IIJ has trained more than 2,000 justice sector practitioners in more than seventy workshops over the past two years.
In addition to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, OPDAT Africa currently supports missions to Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Tanzania, as well as deploys RLAs at AFRICOM and the IIJ in Malta.
Personnel and Projections Following COVID-19 Virus Outbreak
Following the world-wide outbreak of the Covid virus, most all of our RLAs and their families returned to the U.S. We have 4 RLAs remaining overseas: in Ethiopia, Ghana, at the International Institute for Justice in Malta, and at AFRICOM in Stuttgart, Germany. All of the RLAs are telecommuting, and they continue to engage with their U.S. Embassy and foreign counterparts, and generally are carrying out the same responsibilities and working on most of the same projects as they were prior, with the exception of attending meetings and carrying on formal programs.
The characteristics of the virus play on Africa’s many weaknesses. Although the virus affects older populations the most and Africa has a larger percentage of youth, African youth -- and all demographics in Africa -- have a relatively higher rate of vulnerability due to endemic disease (AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, etc.), malnourishment, poverty, poor sanitation and lack of access to health services. Also, larger percentages of Africans live a hand-to-mouth existence that requires daily interaction with others to sustain income.
As noted above, the RLAs continue to work on many of the same initiatives that they were before the viral outbreak. However, we have also attempted to be of some relevance to the immediate issues facing our counterparts. For example, in the very early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak, the Africa team began making inquiries and collecting information about our foreign partners’ remediation efforts, particularly as those relate to prison populations. Additionally, we have begun a similar initiative to track, report and suggest action on Covid-19 related fraud and criminality. Cyber criminals in West Africa have already begun to pivot to phishing, fraud and counterfeit pharmaceutical schemes related to the virus. We are attempting to collaborate with our ICHIP team, as well as track and understand what DOJ is doing domestically in this sphere, in order to help our DOJ and foreign colleagues understand the types and modalities of crimes now being perpetrated, and how we might best combat these.