Alisher Ilkhamov

4 December, 2025

The article analyses the shortcomings of international policies and practices governing the restitution of assets stolen through grand corruption, using the case of Gulnara Karimova, daughter of former Uzbek President Islam Karimov, as a central lens. The author evaluates Switzerland’s mixed record in asset recovery, highlighting both innovative efforts and persistent deficiencies, which nevertheless stands in contrast to the far weaker – and at times implicitly neocolonial – approaches in this field taken by several EU member states and the European Union as a whole. The author critiques the limitations of existing international standards under the UN Convention Against Corruption and the 2017 Global Forum for Asset Recovery, arguing that these frameworks lack effective mechanisms to ensure that repatriated funds benefit the true victims of corruption – the broader population of the asset-source country. The article proposes a more robust GFAR Plus model, which makes anti-corruption reforms a mandatory condition for asset return. This victim-centred approach aims to protect recovered funds from renewed misappropriation and to leverage asset recovery as a tool for long-term institutional change in the field of anti-corruption.