Author Archives: Matthew Stephenson

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About Matthew Stephenson

Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Guest Post: Fishing for the Right ACA Heads, and Keeping Them Safe

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Sofie Arjon Schütte, Senior Advisor at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, contributes the following guest post, adapted from her recent U4 research paper, “The fish’s head: appointment and removal procedures for anti-corruption agency leadership”:

There has been much discussion on this blog (see here, here, and here) about the requirements for an effective, independent anticorruption agency (ACA). A number of factors are important, including (as emphasized in the Jakarta Statement) the ACA’s mandate, permanence, budget security, autonomy over financial and human resources, and internal and external accountability mechanisms, to name a few. But among the many important factors, the procedures for appointment and removal are particularly critical. As the saying goes, “a fish rots from the head down”: when the leadership of an organization is unethical or ineffective, these failings infect the entire organization. Undue external interference with an ACA is likely to target the head, and a co-opted or corrupted ACA head can do serious damage to the effectiveness and reputation of the ACA.

My research on the appointment and removal procedures for heads of 46 ACAs around the world has highlighted some of the important factors that can promote or undermine effective, ethical, and independent ACA leadership. Given different contexts, no specific set of procedures for appointments and removals can be considered ideal for all environments. Nevertheless, some general guidelines are possible: Continue reading →

The 16th International Anti-Corruption Conference — Sept. 2-4, Putrajaya, Malaysia

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Most readers of this blog are probably already aware of this, but just in case:

The 16th International Anti-Corruption Conference will be held this coming September 2-4 in Putrajaya, Malaysia (about 25 km south of Kuala Lumpur). It looks to be an exciting program with lots of great speakers and interesting panels. Registration is now open. It’s rather expensive (even for poor academics), though there’s a discount if you register by August 14. Hope to see some of you there next month!

[A brief addendum: The fact that one of the world’s biggest anticorruption conferences is going to be held in Malaysia, right at the moment when the Malaysian government is engulfed in a major scandal–with allegations of massive corruption by the Prime Minister himself–should make this conference particularly interesting!]

The UK’s Bizarre Mixed Signals on Its Commitment to Fighting Transnational Corruption

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Is the fight against corruption in the developing world a key foreign policy priority for the British government? Or has the attention the Cameron government has been paying to this issue mostly just lip service? I’ve been mulling that question in light of two headlines that caught my eye in last week’s news:

  • First, during his visit to Southeast Asia, Prime Minister Cameron has repeatedly pressed for more aggressive action against corruption, first giving a speech in Singapore in which he denounced the scourge of international corruption and unveiled new policy proposals to limit the flow of dirty money into the UK real estate and financial institutions, and then directly confronting Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia about the deepening corruption scandal in the Malaysian government (a fascinating and troubling story that deserves a separate post at some point).
  • Second, back in London – apparently right around the same time that PM Cameron was delivering his stern remarks about the evils of corruption to his Southeast Asian audiences – UK Business Secretary Sajid Javid invited British industry representatives to submit comments on whether the 2010 UK Bribery Act (which prohibits UK firms from bribing foreign officials) is “a problem” that has had an adverse impact on British exports.

These near-simultaneous headlines make the Cameron government look at best inept, and at worst hypocritical, on its treatment of anticorruption as a foreign policy issue. What is the British government thinking? Continue reading →

Corruption Is a Systems Failure, But Not All Systems Failures Are Corruption

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As regular readers of this blog are probably aware, I try to avoid extended discussions about the definition of corruption (see here, here, and here). Of course it’s important to have a sense of what one is talking about, if only to avoid misunderstandings, but I tend to find extended definitional debates arid and unproductive. (As I’ve remarked before, when academics run out of ideas, they start arguing about definitions.) In my view, there isn’t a single “true” or “correct” definition of corruption—only definitions that are more or less useful, depending on the context. I’m generally perfectly happy with the fairly standard “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” definition. There’s some inherent vagueness (and perhaps some normative/legal judgment) built into concepts like “abuse” and “private gain,” but so what? There are lots of other open-textured concepts that researchers are able to study even though their boundaries are not completely sharp and clear (and where we must sometimes make do with arbitrary cut-off points).

Still, I do think one of the hazards of a term like “corruption” is the occasional tendency to define it so capaciously that it loses any specific meaning. There is an associated tendency to confuse or conflate the somewhat distinct meanings that “corruption” can have in different contexts (for example, legal versus non-legal contexts). So I think, despite my usual aversion to definitional squabbling, it’s occasionally useful to push back against the attempt to define corruption so broadly as to swallow up every way that an institution or organization can go wrong.

I came across an illustration of this in an opinion piece in last week’s Boston Globe (based on an associated post on the MIT Sloan Management Review blog) by George Mason Professor Gregory Unruh. Professor Unruh frames his piece using the recent arrests of various FIFA officials, but suggests that the focus on the personal moral failures of these individuals “muddles executives’ understanding of what corruption is and how it can be managed.” Rather than defining corruption in terms of the “dishonest abuse of power or moral depravity,” Professor Unruh advocates what he calls “the engineer’s definition”:

Any organized, interdependent system in which part of the system is not performing duties as originally intended to, or performing them in an improper way, to the detriment of the system’s original purpose.

This definition, Professor Unruh claims, makes “[i]dentifying corruption in … social systems [like businesses] straightforward.” I don’t think it does. Or if it does, it does so only by defining corruption so expansively as to make the concept essentially useless. Continue reading →

A Victory for the Government, Justice, and Common Sense, in the Bob McDonnell Appeal

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Over the past year, we had a few posts (from Jordan, Rick, and myself) about former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s appeal of his federal bribery convictions. All of us took the position that McDonnell’s main argument on appeal—that his actions on behalf of a local businessman were not “official acts” (and that the loans and lavish gifts this businessman provided were merely for “ingratiation and access”)—was inconsistent both with the governing law and with the facts as presented in the trial record. (Lots of people, though, including two distinguished criminal law experts on my faculty, took the contrary position.) The issue is important not just for U.S. political and legal junkies, but also because the McDonnell appeal raises more general issues about how we think about the line between illegal corruption and legal (though perhaps sleazy) political wheeling & dealing.

As many readers are no doubt aware, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit decided the case earlier this month. And while courts don’t always get it right, this time they did: The three-judge panel unanimously rejected all of McDonnell’s arguments, and cogently explained why in this case the evidence was more than sufficient to support a corruption conviction. Indeed, while there are indeed hard questions about the appropriate line between legal and illegal forms of private influence on public officials, the McDonnell case was not even particularly close to that line.

A few quick observations about the Court of Appeal’ opinion: Continue reading →

Announcement: ASIL Anti-Corruption Conference–Call for Papers

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GAB friend and occasional contributor Professor Andrew Spalding contributes the following announcement:

The American Society of International Law (ASIL) has established an Anti-Corruption Interest Group (ACLIG)  designed to create a forum for mutual engagement among practitioners and scholars. The group will be holding its inaugural conference/workshop on October 2-3, 2015, at the University of Pennsylvania.

The ACLIG co-chairs (Professor Spalding and Professor Philip Nichols) are soliciting papers for this event, from both academics and practitioners. Those who are interested in giving a paper at the meeting should submit a one-page proposal to Ms. Lauretta Tomasco at tomascol@wharton.upenn.edu by August 7, 2015 (two weeks from today!). If accepted, a proposer must supply a paper of at least five pages by September 25, 2015. Copies of all papers will be distributed to all participants before the workshop, so that all workshop participants will be able to read the material in advance and come to the workshop prepared to thoroughly discuss the ideas contained in each paper. (The precise format of the conference/workshop will depend on the number of submissions received.)

Submissions on any topic related to corruption are welcome. Possible topics might include but are not limited to:

  • the nature, manifestations and forms of corruption
  • effects of corruption on business, economies, governments, or society
  • domestic control of corruption
  • comparative analysis of domestic corruption laws
  • corporate liability for corruption
  • codes of conduct to control corruption
  • contracting/controlling third party risk
  • corruption within nongovernmental organizations
  • collective anticorruption programs
  • anticorruption certification standards
  • control of transnational corruption
  • national and international anticorruption regimes
  • coordination of anticorruption regimes
  • soft law controls on corruption
  • legal recourse for victims of corruption
  • an anticorruption organization

Those who are interested but have further questions should please contact Professor Spalding at aspaldin@richmond.edu.

Guest Post: The UK Should Fight Corruption Using “Unexplained Wealth Orders”

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Nick Maxwell, Head of Advocacy and Research at Transparency International-United Kingdom, contributes the following guest post:

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has made the fight against global corruption a high priority for his government, declaring that corruption is the cancer that is at the root of many of the world’s problems. But as much as we should applaud the UK’s efforts to support anticorruption measures and good governance abroad, it is equally important that the UK ensure that it is not a safe haven for the proceeds of corruption stolen throughout the world. Yet here the UK has fallen short: We have only seen limited asset restraint and recovery against the proceeds of corruption, especially against those currently associated to power. While estimates of total extent of the problem vary, it is generally agreed that large amounts of unexplained suspicious wealth enter the UK each year and are invested in the British financial system, in property, in luxury goods or in other areas of the economy. And despite the fact that UK law enforcement has the necessary expertise on this issue, the rate of asset recovery by UK agencies of the proceeds of grand corruption is undeniably very low compared to the scale of the problem.

Given the scale of the problem and the inadequacy of the government’s response to date, Transparency International’s UK chapter (TI-UK) established a taskforce of experts to review the legislation in place to deter grand corruption and recover stolen assets that have made their way into or through the UK. The results of the taskforce’s deliberations were published last month as a discussion paper entitled Empowering the UK to recover corrupt assets: New approaches to illicit enrichment and asset recovery; the paper sets out a new proposal for UK law enforcement: the use of an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO), which would allow UK law enforcement to start proactively questioning suspicious unexplained wealth associated with foreign public officials, and to start civil recovery proceedings against the relevant assets.

Continue reading →

Anticorruption Bibliography–July 2015 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.

Singapore and Hong Kong Are Small. So What?

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In my last post, I suggested some reasons why Singapore’s squeaky-clean reputation might not be entirely justified. But nothing I said in that post was meant to deny or disparage Singapore’s extraordinary success in fighting many of the most pervasive and destructive forms of corruption. Indeed, in this post I want to emphasize just how remarkably Singapore—and its fellow Asian city-state Hong Kong—have been in fighting corruption by addressing one of the most common observations raised by those who would either minimize the significance of this achievement, or raise doubts about whether other countries can profitably learn from Singapore and Hong Kong’s experience.

I’m sure many of us who work on international corruption issues have heard something like this from time to time: Whenever we look for success stories or models, someone usually brings up Hong Kong and Singapore as examples of how it is possible, with the right combination of policies and leadership, to get even massive corruption under control within the space of a generation. But, almost as invariably, we hear the skeptical response: “We can’t really learn all that much from Singapore and Hong Kong,” our skeptic intones, “because those are small city-states.”

Now, the skeptics may be right. But what’s always struck me as odd about this exchange (which I’ve heard many times, in one form or another) is that those offering this skeptical view seem to be implicitly assuming that it’s easier to combat corruption in a small city-state than it is in a large country, but they rarely explain why this is true. And at least to me, the case hardly seems self-evident. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it certainly requires more critical scrutiny than it usually receives. Continue reading →

Guest Post: A “Guatemalan Spring”? — Not Yet.

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Alicia Robinson, a student at Harvard Law School, contributes the following guest post:

Guatemala has long been beset by persistent poverty, corruption, and a culture of impunity – an Unholy Trinity that has afflicted much of Central and South America. Moreover, Guatemala has the misfortune of being geographically located at the center of major drug trafficking routes to the North American and European markets, where the unrelenting demand has allowed organized crime to strengthen its hold over the country’s institutions of governance. Yet as Mathieu Tromme’s recent post on this blog highlighted, there are some encouraging signs of change. Most notably, the recent uncovering of a massive tax fraud orechestrated at the highest levels of the executive branch triggered protests that forced the resignation of the vice president – a major victory against impunity in the country.

However, despite this success, and the broad popular support for more action against corruption and impunity, Mr. Tromme may be overly optimistic when he characterizes this this event and the surrounding protests as the inception of a “Guatemalan Spring” that will bring an end to the era of impunity in Guatemala. Corruption still very much riddles every corner of Guatemalan society and the toughest part of the battle lies ahead. Continue reading →