Camelia Bogdan

Fostering Democracy in Romania: Lessons from the Judiciary

Dr. Camelia Bogdan is a judge on the Bucharest Court of Appeals and is an expert on asset recovery, countering money laundering, and combating transnational corruption and other financial crimes. She has twice been expelled from the Romanian judiciary on politically motivated charges, as a result of her battle against the corruption of political and economic elites. An accomplished scholar with a doctorate in criminal law from the University of Bucharest, she has authored two monographs on asset recovery and money laundering, several practical guides to asset recovery for practitioners at the national and EU level, and over 130 judicial studies in law journals. She is an associate researcher with the Centre Régional Francophone de Recherches Avancées en Sciences Humaines et Sociales de Bucarest (CEREFREA–Villa Noël) and contributes regularly to the University of Cambridge’s International Symposium on Financial Crimes. In 2018, she was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. In recognition of her work, she received the 2019 Ion Ratiu Democracy Award from the Woodrow Wilson Center. During her fellowship, she plans to draw upon her own experience as a judge in Romania in developing a set of policy recommendations for addressing corruption and money laundering through the national and international legal system.