Anticorruption
Analysing anti-bribery legislation is important to identify weaknesses and areas of improvement in existing laws. In the third publication of WFD’s anti-bribery and integrity series, a comparative analysis is carried out of the UK Bribery Act (2010) and anti-corruption legislation in Ukraine, Indonesia and Kenya.
Governments have a key role to play in the fight against corruption. For governments to effectively tackle corruption we must focus on strengthening their three main functions: legislation, oversight and representation. When these are strengthened corruption reduces.
The first ever UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) against corruption will take place in New York from 2 to 4 June 2021. UNGASS 2021 represents a unique opportunity to strengthen our collective anti-corruption efforts. With that recognition, WFD has released a new policy brief on ‘Doing anti-corruption democratically’ that outlines the complementary reality of democracy and anti-corruption.
Corruption is an aspect of poor governance which negatively affects a country’s economic development as well as the effective provision of public services in society. As the awareness of the detrimental effects of corruption on development has grown, strategies to fight it are now a priority in international development and policy circles. To date, however, few successes have resulted from the investment. In fact, in some countries corruption even seems to have become more entrenched in step with the efforts to curb it.
Given that ACAs should be independent, particularly of the government of the day, it is a country’s parliament that holds responsibility to provide them with a strong mandate, guarantees of independence, security of tenure, and to hold them accountable for their activities.
In this publication, we concentrate on the aspects of the relationship that can illuminate whether a parliament performs these responsibilities in a proper manner:
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Parliament’s role in establishing the legal framework and mandate of the ACA;
When the UK government published its Anti-Corruption Strategy 2017 to 2022, global corruption was recognised as having far-reaching effects, including prolonging extreme poverty, reducing economic activity, growth, trade and investment, and threatening international security. The World Bank’s analysis reinforces this, and there is no doubt that corruption is corrosive in many ways.
Human rights violators should be scared. More and more democratic countries are holding them individually accountable for their crimes and are issuing individual so-called ‘Magnitsky Sanctions’ to target them where it hurts most: their pockets and their freedom to travel.