Author Archives: Matthew Stephenson

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About Matthew Stephenson

Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Guest Post: Toward Global Standards for Defense Sector Governance

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Amira El-Sayed, Program Manager for Transparency International’s Responsible Defence Governance program, contributes today’s guest post:

The governance of military power presents one of the great global challenges of our age. The defense sector is large, powerful, and secretive, and for those reasons especially vulnerable to corruption. In many countries, small groups of elites divert defense resources for personal enrichment, which can create risks to a state’s stability and security. Perhaps ever more troubling, in many countries powerful militaries run vast and secretive business empires exempt from oversight. Some of these businesses, such as resource extraction, are nominally legal, but militaries are often enmeshed with illegal activities like the trafficking of drugs, arms, and people. This too threatens state security, in at least two ways. First, poorly governed, corrupt militaries may be unable to respond effectively to genuine national security threats. Second, when the military uses its power to secure economic advantages for elites, this may contribute to the public resentment and frustration that can fuel violent extremist movements.

Improving governance in the defense sector is especially challenging. Defense sectors have historically hidden behind an “exceptional” status that has been used to stymie governance reform, with “national security” invoked as a sweeping justification to evade legitimate scrutiny from independent institutions and experts, such as auditors, anticorruption institutions, and civil society organizations. And this is not just an issue in authoritarian states: even in democracies, militaries are often exempted from meaningful oversight by parliamentary committees, judiciaries, audit offices, and anticorruption bodies, even as oversight by those bodies expands in other areas. While the need for secrecy may well be more pressing with respect to certain aspects of military and defense policy, the exemption of the defense sector from meaningful scrutiny is often overbroad, unjustified, and used to mask corruption, misuse of resources, and incompetence.

So how do you address one of the most complex challenges in governance, in a sector that has been exceptionally secretive, opaque, and impenetrable? Some of the work has to be done at the national level in individual countries, tailored to the each country’s specific circumstances. (There are many examples of such work by Transparency International (TI) and other civil society organizations. For instance, in Ukraine TI worked to establish high-level defense anticorruption committee called NAKO, and in Nigeria TI worked with the Air Force to take examine its governance structures and anticorruption systems.) But what about global standards, along the lines of what has been developed in other areas, like human rights and labor? Here there appears to be a significant gap. True, some security-related instruments do provide some principles for state/military behavior in specific areas, such as the OCSE Code of Conduct, UN Arms Trade Treaty, the NATO Building Integrity Programme, and the Tshwane Principles. And some of the general anticorruption or governance-related instruments, such as the UN Convention Against Corruption and Open Government Partnership, have some limited applications to the defense sector. But none of these instruments offers a comprehensive global approach to defense governance.

To fill this gap, TI is launching an initiative to formulate, formalize, and promote a set of global principles that underpin responsible, accountable governance of military power—principles that would embrace the idea that the military must be accountable to the people and that would, if followed, improve domestic governance of the defense sector. That is, TI is working with national governments, other civil society organizations, and the international community to develop Global Standards for Responsible Defense Governance, embodied in a Declaration on the Responsible Governance of Military Power. Continue reading →

Some Things Are More Important Than Corruption (Brazilian Elections Edition)

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In the anticorruption community, it is fairly common to puzzle over—and bemoan—the fact that voters in many democracies seem to support candidates that are known or reputed to be corrupt. “Why,” we often ask, “do voters often elect or re-elect corrupt politicians, despite the fact that voters claim to despise corruption?” One of the common answers that we give to this question (an answer supported by some empirical research) is that even though voters dislike corruption, they care more about other things, and are often willing to overlook serious allegations of impropriety if a candidate or party is attractive for other reasons. We often make this observation ruefully, sometimes accompanied with the explicit or implicit wish that voters would make anticorruption a higher priority when casting their votes.

We should be careful what we wish for. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Is an International Anti-Corruption Court a Dream or a Distraction?

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My Harvard Law School colleague Professor Alex Whiting, who previously served in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, as a Senior Trial Attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and as a US federal prosecutor, contributes today’s guest post:

Since 2014, US Judge Mark Wolf has been vigorously advocating the creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC), modeled on the International Criminal Court (ICC), to combat grand corruption around the world. Some, including writers on this blog, have expressed skepticism, and have criticized Judge Wolf and other IACC supporters for not offering sufficient detail on how an IACC would work or how, as a political matter, it could be created. This past summer, in an article published in Daedalus, Judge Wolf laid out a more detailed case for the IACC. He again invoked the ICC as the model—both for how such a court could be created and how it would operate.

It is an enticing vision, to be sure: international prosecutors swooping in to collar high-level corrupt actors, further spurring on national leaders to clean up their own houses. It’s all the more enticing given that, as Judge Wolf persuasively argues, national governments have failed to adequately address grand corruption in their own jurisdictions, with significant adverse consequences for international security and prosperity. But the ICC experience suggests the limits rather than the promise of an IACC. Indeed, the ICC’s history demonstrates why it is so hard to see a feasible political path forward to creating an IACC. More fundamentally, an IACC would require a radical re-conceptualization of the ICC model, one that states have never shown a willingness to embrace. Continue reading →

The Lula Opinions (Trial Court Verdict and Summary of Appeals Court Affirmance), Now Available in English Translation

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The conviction and imprisonment of former Brazilian President (and current would-be presidential candidate) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) is among of the most consequential and polarizing outcomes of a corruption investigation in recent memory. The case that led to Lula’s conviction (one of several that were pending against him) did not necessarily involve the biggest or most important allegations, but it was the one that was brought first, presumably because this was the case where the prosecutors felt they had all the evidence they needed to proceed, though critics insist that the case was rushed through on skimpy evidence in order to disable Lula from seeking the presidency in this month’s election.

I only know a bit about the specifics of the case, which involved a beachfront apartment than a construction company had allegedly promised to Lula in return for helping the company secure contracts with Brazil’s state-owned oil company. (Lula, for his part, claims that he was never promised the apartment and the only evidence otherwise is unreliable testimony from one of the company’s executives, who offered the testimony in exchange for a reduced sentence as part of a plea bargain.) But I’ve been repeatedly told by passionate, seemingly well-informed Brazilians on both sides of this debate that the judicial opinions in this case—the original trial court verdict and the appellate court affirmance—demonstrate that their side of the argument is clearly correct:

  • On the one hand, I’ve been told by several of Lula’s strong supporters that the charges against him are bogus and the conviction is improper. “Just read the judicial opinions from the trial court and the appeals court,” one of them told me last spring, “and it will be obvious that they make no sense, and that there was no real legal or factual basis for the conviction.” (I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly.)
  • On the other hand, I’ve been told by supporters of the prosecution in this case that Lula’s conviction was the right legal result, and that the attacks on the verdict (and the associated attacks on the prosecutors and judges) are politically-motivated obfuscation. “Just read the judicial opinions from the trial court and the appeals court,” several people with this view have emphasized, “and it will be obvious that the law and the evidence amply supported the verdict.”

Since smart, well-informed advocates on both sides have told me I should read the opinions, that seemed like a sensible thing to do. Until recently, though, this would not have been possible, as the opinions were (to my knowledge) only available in Portuguese, which I do not read. But I was recently informed that the trial court opinion, as well as an official summary of the appeals court opinion, are now available online in English translation! I haven’t had a chance to read them yet (the trial court opinion is 185 pages long; the summary of the appellate court ruling is a more succinct six pages); I may post again after I’ve done so if I feel like I’ve got anything useful to say. For now, it occurs to me that there might be other non-Portuguese speakers out there who are following developments in Brazil and would like to read these opinions for themselves, so I’m posting the links:

  • The trial court verdict is here.
  • A summary of the appellate court ruling is here. (I’m still hoping to find and post an English translation of the full appeals court ruling.)

Hopefully this will be helpful to others who are trying to work through what they think about the accusations and counter-accusations swirling around this high-profile case. Again, there’s only so much an outsider can learn from the text of court opinions, especially without knowing more about the surrounding context and the details of Brazilian law, but I figure this will at least be helpful.

[NOTE: The original version of this post erroneously characterized the appeals court document linked to above as the full appeals court ruling. That was incorrect; the online document is an English translation of the summary of the appeals court ruling. The text of the post–as well as its title–have been changed to correct this mistake.]

Tracking Corruption and Conflicts of Interest in the Trump Administration–October 2018 Update

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Since May 2017, GAB has been tracking credible allegations that President Trump, as well as his family members and close associates, are seeking to use the presidency to advance their personal financial interests, and providing monthly updates on media reports of such issues. After a lapse of a few months during this past summer, we’re again updating the tracker on a monthly basis. The October 2018 update is now available here. Notable additions since the previous update include:

  • Reports that Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club offered discounts to President Trump’s White House staff on branded golf club merchandise, apparently to encourage White House staff to wear Bedminster apparel as a way of promoting the resort and the brand.
  • Reports that President Trump has been personally involved in plans regarding the construction of a new FBI headquarters, including suspicions that President Trump may have interceded to ensure that the new headquarters would be built at the same location as the current headquarters, across the street from the Trump International Hotel, rather than at a larger and more secure location in the suburbs, because the Trump hotel benefits financially from its proximity to FBI headquarters.
  • Reports that administration officials with financial or processional ties to the steel industry have been exercising their influence to deny tariff exclusions to companies applying for such exclusions under Trump’s new steel tariffs.

As always, we note that while we try to include only those allegations that appear credible, we acknowledge that many of the allegations that we discuss are speculative and/or contested. We also do not attempt a full analysis of the laws and regulations that may or may not have been broken if the allegations are true. For an overview of some of the relevant federal laws and regulations that might apply to some of the alleged problematic conduct, see here.

Guest Post: The Result in US v. Hoskins is Required by the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention

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GAB is pleased to welcome back Frederick Davis, a lawyer in the Paris and New York offices of Debevoise & Plimpton and a Lecturer at Columbia Law School, who contributes the following guest post:

Much has been written about the long-awaited decision in US v. Hoskins, on this blog (see here and here) and elsewhere. In Hoskins, a US federal appeals court held that the U.S. cannot charge a foreign national acting abroad (and who therefore couldn’t be charged directly with violating the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)) by alleging vicarious liability under either the aiding and abetting statute, 18 U.S.C § 2, or the conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 371. Judge Pooler’s opinion for the court relied on two justifications: First, under the principle established by a Supreme Court cased called Gebardi v. United States and its progeny, Congress clearly indicated an affirmative legislative policy to exclude from complicity or conspiracy liability parties like Mr. Hoskins (foreign nationals acting abroad). Second, the FCPA lacks the requisite affirmative indication of congressional intent, demanded in cases like Morrison v. National Australia Bank, that Congress intended the FCPA to apply extraterritorially to the kind of conduct in question. (Analytically, these two tests are very similar, as they both ask, “What did Congress intend?” The principal difference is the burden of persuasion: The Gebardi  line of cases, while not always entirely consistent, seem to indicate that prosecutors can generally invoke complicity or conspiracy liability even of someone who could not be prosecuted as a principal unless there’s a strong showing that this is contrary to congressional intent, while the extraterritoriality analysis, on the other hand, typically puts the burden on the prosecutor to show that a statute was intended to apply extraterritorially in the circumstances raised by a specific indictment.) The court dismissed the conspiracy and complicity charges against Hopkins, but remanded the case on the assumption that Mr. Hoskins might still be directly liable under the FCPA if the government could prove that he was acting as an agent of Alstom’s US subsidiary.

In my view, the court’s decision was clearly correct. But the court could have gone further to address another issue that, while not formally before the court, will need to be addressed on remand: The implications of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. The OECD Convention is far more important to the appropriate interpretation of the FCPA than the court acknowledged, provides compelling support for the Hoskins outcome, and should also control the resolution of the issue the appeals court left open for consideration on remand. Continue reading →

When Are Quid Pro Quo Campaign Contributions Corrupt? When Are They an Embodiment of Democracy?

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Recent developments in the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court have been dramatic, to say the least. As I type this, most of the discussion of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination has focused on allegations that, while in high school, he and a friend sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl. Events are moving so fast that by the time this post is published (which will likely be a few days from now, since I typically write these things in advance), there may be more new developments. But I actually don’t want to talk here about the issues that have (rightly) taken center stage with respect to this nomination. Rather, I want to discuss another controversy connected to Kavanaugh’s nomination that had been getting a fair bit of press until it was overshadowed by the disclosure of the sexual assault allegations. That controversy concerned a coalition of civil society groups in Maine that used crowdfunding to raise over $1 million, and declared that they would donate these funds to the opponent of Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine the next time she is up for re-election (in 2020) if she votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Is that corrupt? Senator Collins and several of her political allies think so. Senator Collins denounced the campaign as “bribery or extortion.” Other commenters agreed (see here and here). And a group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) wrote to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to call for an investigation of the groups that organized the crowdfunding campaign, alleging that conditioning a campaign donation to Senator Collins’ opponent on whether Senator Collins supports Kavanaugh is “an illegal attempt to influence an elected official’s specific vote” in violation of 18 U.S.C. §201(b), the section of the federal bribery statute that makes it a crime to “directly or indirectly, corruptly … offer[] … anything of value to any public official … with intent to influence any official act.” It’s perhaps worth noting that although FACT describes itself as a “non-partisan ethics watchdog,” its ethics complaints are targeted overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) at Democrats, and it is funded entirely by an anonymous trust fund (a so-called “pass-through”) favored by ultra-wealthy conservative donors, including Charles Koch. So reasonable people might take FACT’s own conclusions with more than a grain of salt. Still, though, the allegation that the grassroots campaign targeting Collins is engaging in illegal “bribery,” though in my view wrong as a matter of both law and ethics, is worth taking seriously, because it highlights some of the fundamental problems with the regulation of campaign finance in the United States—in particular the use of a “corruption” paradigm to address what’s mainly a political equality problem. Continue reading →

Guest Post: After the Tsunami–Mexico’s Anticorruption Outlook Under Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

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Today’s guest post is from Bonnie J. Palifka, Associate Professor of Economics at Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM), and Luis A. Garcia, a partner at Villarreal-VGF specializing in corporate compliance and anticorruption matters:

The results of Mexico’s federal elections last July have been described as a “tsunami” for Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his National Regeneration Movement, known by its Spanish acronym “Morena.” AMLO won 53% of the popular vote and Morena swept the House and Senate, as well as a majority of the nine state governorships up for grabs and several local legislatures. This is all the more remarkable considering that Morena was founded as a civil society organization in 2011 (and registered as a political party in 2014), and was fighting for control of Mexico’s political left against AMLO’s former party, the PRD. Many are hopeful that AMLO will lead a transformation of Mexico into a modern, peaceful, fair, and prosperous society like Chile or Uruguay, while others fear that he will take the country down the route of Venezuela. That the same person can engender such different reactions is due in part to the vagueness and inconsistency of AMLO’s rhetoric throughout the campaign: sometimes he would take a highly confrontational and uncompromising attitude toward Mexico’s political and economic elite—what he termed the “mafia of power”—while at other times he would strike a more conciliatory tone. But one consistent theme in AMLO’s rhetoric—and in the analysis of the data on the reasons for Morena’s electoral triumph—was profound indignation at the blatant corruption and impunity of Mexico’s political and business elites.

Mexican voters’ frustration with corruption is understandable. Although in recent decades Mexico has undertaken a number of anticorruption measures—including, under former President Vicente Fox, a new freedom of information law, and, under current President Enrique Peña Nieto, a new National Anticorruption System (SNA), which, among other things, updates national and state laws to criminalize more acts, reduce immunities, and increase punishments—these measures have been insufficient, as reflected in Mexico’s increasingly poor showing on the Corruption Perceptions Index. AMLO identified corruption as Mexico’s most pressing problem and promised to bring about an honest and transparent regime that would be truly responsive to the country’s needs. And, in an encouraging sign, AMLO has brought in a diverse group of highly respected experts and activists, from all sides of the political spectrum, and has appeared flexible and open to dialogue. At the same time, though, he has displayed a puzzling blind spot for potential conflicts of interest, and his optimistic rhetoric has suffered from a lack of specificity, coherence, and concrete proposals. Continue reading →

The US Can (Probably) Charge Bribe-Taking Foreign Officials as Conspirators or Accomplices in FCPA Cases

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Given everything else that’s happening related to corruption right now (much of it awful), perhaps it’s a mistake for me to be spending so much time thinking about fairly narrow doctrinal issues related to applications of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). But my reflections on the recent court of appeals decision in US v. Hoskins (which held that a foreign national could not be charged as an accomplice or co-conspirator in an FCPA violation based on conduct occurring abroad) have gotten me thinking about—and questioning—what I had assumed was a well-settled and straightforward conclusion that the foreign official who takes a bribe from a person or entity covered by the FCPA cannot be charged with aiding and abetting, or conspiring to commit, that FCPA violation.

That conclusion—that bribe-taking foreign officials may not be charged as accomplices or co-conspirators in FCPA cases—was announced by a US court of appeals in 1991 in a case called United States v. Castle. In Castle, according to the allegations (which for present purposes I’ll assume to be true), two private US businessmen paid a $50,000 bribe to two Canadian government officials in order to win a contract to provide public buses to the provincial government. The US government charged the American citizens with violating the FCPA—which, if the facts are as alleged, they clearly did. The Canadian officials cannot directly violate the FCPA, which by its terms prohibits only covered entities from giving (or promising or offering) bribes to foreign public officials; the FCPA does not criminalize the act of taking a bribe. But in the Castle case, the US government tried to get around this problem by charging the Canadian officials with conspiracy to violate the FCPA, pursuant to the federal conspiracy statute, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 371. That section makes it a separate crime (“conspiracy”) for “two or more persons [to] conspire … to commit any [federal] offense,” as long as “one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy.” According to the U.S. government’s theory of the case, once the Canadian officials agreed with the US businessmen to accept money in exchange for a public contract, they had all conspired to commit a federal crime, and once the US businessmen took action in furtherance of this conspiracy (by paying the money), all the parties, including the Canadian officials, were liable as co-conspirators. The US district judge rejected that theory, and the court of appeals affirmed, simply endorsing and reprinting (with one minor correction) the district judge’s ruling.

Since Castle, so far as I can tell, this principle that the US government can’t prosecute bribe-taking foreign officials as conspirators in an FCPA violation (or, similarly, as accomplices to an FCPA violation under another statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2(a)), seems to have become generally accepted, largely unchallenged by the US government, and treated as clearly correct as matter of legal doctrine. And it matters a great deal as a policy matter: If the Castle ruling had gone the other way, than the FCPA—complemented by the general conspiracy and complicity statutes—would give the US government a very powerful tool, for better or worse, to prosecute bribe-taking foreign government officials, at least those with sufficient ties to the US to establish personal jurisdiction (an important qualification I’ll return to later). I’d always assumed, without much reflection, that Castle was rightly decided. But after some digging into the case law, prompted largely by the more recent decision in Hoskins, and re-reading the Castle opinion, I think that Castle’s broad holding is doctrinally incorrect. If certain other conditions hold, a bribe-taking foreign official can be guilty as an accomplice to or co-conspirator in an FCPA violation, even though the foreign official could not directly violate the FCPA. Continue reading →

Anticorruption Bibliography–September 2018 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.