International Law and Immigration
Ca. Int'l Law Journal VOL. 23, NO. 1, SUMMER 2015
Content
- "a Candid Reckoning With a Sordid Chapter" of History
- Alert: the Supreme Court, Equitable Tolling and International Treaty Interpretation
- Contents
- Editor's Comments
- Global Legal Research
- Greetings From the Chair of the International Law Section
- Investor-State Dispute Settlement under the Trans-Pacific Partnership
- Masthead
- Practitioner's Spotlight: Interview With Dorian Daley
- Preparing for Tomorrow's Trans-Pacific Partnership
- Seizing Equatorial Guinea's Future: Punishing Foreign Kleptocracy with Civil Asset Forfeiture
- Taiwan's Experience Implementing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: One Example of Transnational Constitutionalism*
- Attacking Corruption at its Source: the Doj's Recent Efforts to Prosecute Bribe-Taking Foreign Officials
Attacking Corruption at its Source: The DOJ’s Recent Efforts to Prosecute Bribe-Taking Foreign Officials
By Miwa Shoda and Andrew G. Sullivan*
I. INTRODUCTION
On February 9, 2015, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the conviction and nine-year prison sentence of Jean Rene Duperval on charges of accepting bribes while he served as the director of Haiti’s state-owned telecommunications company.1 This decision represents the latest development in a string of recent enforcement actions by the U.S. Department of Justice ("DOJ") against bribe-taking foreign officials.2
Historically, the DOJ has not targeted this category of bad actors because the prosecutorial tool used to combat foreign bribery—the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ("FCPA")—does not extend to the prosecution of foreign officials who solicit and accept bribes.3 However, the DOJ recently has changed course by side-stepping the FCPA and instead prosecuting these foreign officials under other laws,4 most commonly the Money Laundering Control Act5 ("MLCA") and related conspiracy charges.