Certainly I would reiterate, ma'am, that what makes the CIJA unique is that it's the first time a private body, albeit non-profit, has undertaken international criminal investigations.
I'm a career international criminal investigator. I've been doing this for 20 years now. I started the foundation with the belief that international criminal investigations have no real future unless the system is shaken up to a certain degree. The difficulty is that the investigations have become very slow and very expensive. What we're seeing in the various countries that actually pay for these bodies—the Yugoslavia tribunal, Rwanda tribunal, the International Criminal Court, and so forth—is a considerable degree of donor fatigue. The budgets are just very, very high.
On one level, the CIJA is not about Syria and Iraq. In fact, we are engaged, albeit only modestly at this point, in a number of other armed conflicts. The CIJA is about fostering the evolution of international criminal and humanitarian law investigations, with the idea of making them faster, cheaper, and, from an evidentiary point of view, better.
We found that the model works. It works quite well, principally for three reasons.
One reason is leadership. We've all come out of the international system as investigators, analysts, and counsel, so we know how to put together an international criminal case, or indeed domestic criminal cases as well.
Second, and the principal advantage that we enjoy over international and domestic bodies—not that we're in competition, because we're meant to support these institutions—is the fact that we have a very, very high risk tolerance, a risk tolerance that no public body, other than armed forces, could realistically take on. I want to stress that there's a very big difference between a high risk tolerance and a high risk appetite. We have no risk appetite, but we have this high risk tolerance.
The third thing is that of course one needs enough money. Compared to an international criminal investigative body, we're of course very cheap, if I could put it crudely. We have had sufficient funding over the last several years, but frankly, fundraising is the bane of our existence, because we're lumped in with, if you will, the human rights community. If we were documenting, in the broad sense, like a human rights organization, our budget would be enormous, or it would be considered enormous.
Just to summarize that, and in answer to your first question, I'm aware of the criticisms of the so-called privatization of international criminal investigations. I hear them when I'm going around speaking. There are not many at this point...what we hear as normally coming from NGOs. Our colleagues, former colleagues in the public institutions, especially counsel, are very keen on the idea. I get a surprising number of discreet applications from colleagues still in the institutions and wanting to come and work with us.
Ultimately, the key task is that we need to see more of our dossiers go to trial domestically and of course internationally. The survival of our investigation is at trial. That's the proof in the pudding, if you will.
Finally, in terms of the co-operation challenges with public authorities, when selling this concept, so to speak, we don't charge domestic authorities for the assistance. If we have the resources and the money, then we assist. Sometimes, indeed, we're proactive, taking case files discreetly to national authorities when we pick up on higher-level suspects in their territory through our own networks.
Domestic authorities were very quick to warm to the CIJA model. We refer to it as the CIJA model, and I hope, in the fullness of time, we see, as soon as possible, more CIJAs emerge, called whatever they are. I think this is key to making domestic and international investigations better.
Yes, the domestic authorities have warmed very quickly. Each country has its own data privacy laws, which can be an issue. With some countries, especially if we're supporting them on the Islamic State side, the information flow is very much one way, from CIJA to the national authority. If we're supporting national immigration authorities, usually we're just running names, and they'll come back for clarification on the hits, but there's not a lot of back and forth there.
There's tremendous back and forth with the national prosecutorial and investigative authorities. It's very collaborative. Some countries are held back by their data privacy laws and the fact that we're a private non-governmental institution. In most countries, the laws are not that bad, including Canada. Some countries are simply ignoring whatever their data privacy laws are to get the job done.