To Perfect China’s Mechanism For Recovery Of Overseas Stolen Goods

Corruption has long been one of the issues people care about. Corruption of civil servants, not only discredits their personal reputation,but also damages the image of the Party and the government. It causes heavy losses in all aspects of our country.With the development of economic globalization, links between countries become stronger. Nowadays, corruption crimes show a feature of transnationalization. In China, situations that corrupt officials flee abroad or transfer corruption assets to foreign countries, are more and more common. According to data and statistics from 1990 to recent years, China’s outflow of corruption assets has been over 800 billion yuan. Thus, in order to restore the loss of outflow and to alert officials, one of China’s urgent needs is to establish a sound mechanism for corruption assets recovery.As more and more corruption assets outflow, China’s cross-border pursuit of corruption assets is undergoing. Now the Party and the government attach great importance to anti-corruption work, and cross-border pursuit of corruption assets has been raised to an unprecedented level. Ministry of Public Security in July 2014 initiated the act of "Fox Hunting 2014" to pursue corruption assets and corrupt officials abroad. In order to prevent and combat corruption, China should cooperate with other countries in the world to abandon the ideological and judicial differences in the fight against corruption. Currently, international cooperation in China has achieved initial results. We signed the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, joined APEC enforcement cooperation network, and will sign our first assets recovery agreement with Canada, and will sign an overseas tax collection agreement with America.However, we have to admit that China is facing with numerous obstacles in the process of corruption assets recovery. In addition to failure to establish a good relationship with the most developed countries in international judicial assistance, there are problems in our own legal system in pursuing corruption assets abroad. Thus, overseas activities in corruption assets recovery cannot be carried out smoothly. In order to improve China’s cross-border mechanism for corruption assets recovery, the author proposes a series of suggestions to figure out these problems by studying the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, and other outstanding schemes of corruption assets recovery, such as the UK special kind of civil procedure.This paper is divided into four parts. It discusses how to perfect the cross-border mechanism for assets recovery, from the respect of China’s outflow of corruption assets. The first chapter discusses the necessity to recover outflow of corruption assets. In this chapter, corruption and corruption crime are defined at the beginning; then, it introduces the situation of China’s outflow of corruption assets, and stresses that recovering overseas corruption assets has great significance to anti-corruption in China; at the end of this chapter the author tells us it is the time to build a sound mechanism for recovery of overseas corruption assets. The second chapter describes the difficult situations China faces with in the process of recovering overseas corruption assets: First, pursuit problems affect recovering overseas corruption assets. Secondly, money laundering impact locating the assets and proving the crime abroad. Thirdly, China’s judgments of asset forfeiture are difficult to be recognized and enforced in other countries. And there are loopholes in our law of corruption crime. At last, China lacks asset-sharing mechanism. The third chapter introduces the international convention United Nations Convention Against Corruption, and the British law Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. United Nations Convention Against Corruption introduces two new methods in assets recovery, mechanism for return and disposal of assets, mechanism for monitoring and preventing transfer of assets, and special investigative techniques. In the fourth chapter, the author makes several substantive recommendations in building a sound mechanism for overseas corruption assets recovery.