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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
Afghanistan: coupling security and reconstruction?
“US NGOs are having a hard time with the present government”
Crisis prevention in Africa – promising progress
Cooperation – The path to successful peace work
Scant progress so far in the fight against bribery
12/2003 |
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[ OECD anti-corruption convention is four years old ]
Scant progress so far in the fight against bribery
The OECD anti-corruption convention has been in force since 1999 and has now been ratified and translated into national law by all 35 signatories (including five non-OECD countries). But neither the convention nor the national statutes making the payment of a bribe abroad an offence have proven very effective. According to Michael Wiehen of the German section of the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International (TI), the bribery ban has not produced a single conviction in Germany so far; nationwide there are only six or seven cases of judicial inquiry. And Wiehen says things are no better in the other countries that signed up to the convention. “We are very concerned that so little is being done”, he says.
The reason for this meagre result is not that there is not much corruption in international business. A meeting of experts arranged by TI at the beginning of October in Paris produced a long list of shortcomings which hinder effective criminal prosecution. In most countries, for example, prosecution services do not have the human and material resources needed to engage in expensive and time-consuming international corruption proceedings. Another problem is that powers and resources are divided among lots of authorities at different levels. Only in France is there an office with central reponsibility at national level. Poor marks are also awarded for international legal assistance. Developing countries especially – in which many corruption cases involving companies from OECD countries occur – are party to precious few international law enforcement treaties. Another reason for the low level of legal action is a striking lack of complaints. This, in turn, might be due to the fact that the OECD convention is not widely known and public attention to the problem is accordingly scant.
The meeting in Paris gave governments, jurists and civil society organisations lots of homework for improving the efficacy of corruption control. More specialists in corruption proceedings should be trained, they were told, and powers of criminal prosecution ought to be centralised at national level. To heighten awareness of the convention, OECD members should launch anti-corruption publicity campaigns at home and in developing countries, working in cooperation with civil society, private enterprise and international organisations such as the World Bank, World Trade Organisation and United Nations. Mutual legal assistance between industrialised and developing countries needs to be significantly intensified and technical assistance given to the poorer countries to provide an effective platform for this. The procedure used to evaluate the implementation of the convention needs to be financially better equipped and more systematically applied by the signatory states. Transparency International announced it would report annually in future on the efforts made to implement the convention. And as for private enterprise, the experts called on companies to create their own programmes for combating corruption. (ell)
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