Category Archives: Commentary

Who Guards the Guardians in the Anticorruption Battle? Compelling Prosecutors to Take Action

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Article 30(3) of UNCAC calls upon state parties to ensure that any legal discretion pertinent to the prosecution of corruption is exercised to “to maximize the effectiveness of law enforcement.” Yet there is evidence that prosecutors do not always exercise their discretion in anticorruption cases in a manner that conforms to this principle. Prosecutorial decisions to shelve or terminate a case might instead be influenced by economic considerations — as when a large financial institution is involved, or when prosecution risks losing a valuable foreign investor — and by political considerations — as when the case may influence foreign diplomatic relations or when the case involves senior officials or other parties close to the governing regime.

There is no shortage of such troubling cases in both developed and developing countries. One of the best-known is the BAE Systems/Al-Yamamah case, which involved credible allegations that the British multinational had paid substantial bribes to senior Saudi Arabian officials in connection to a major arms deal. The UK investigation into the bribery allegations was brought to an end on grounds of public interest. The British government, and some of its defenders, emphasized the need to combat terrorism through maintaining relationship with Saudi Arabia with all underlying intelligence cooperation. Nevertheless, cases of this kind impair progress against entrenched corruption. Even if such cases are relatively infrequent, their existence risks depriving both the UNCAC treaty and domestic anticorruption laws of their deterrent effect.

If public prosecutors sometimes fail in their responsibility as anticorruption “guardians” by shelving or dropping investigations, what can be done? Long term solutions might require broader systemic reform, but there are some actions that could be taken, under the rubric of the UNCAC, to pressure or compel prosecutors to fulfill their responsibilities: Continue reading →

More on the Tension between Analysis and Advocacy for Anticorruption Academics

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A couple weeks back I posted some brief reflections that  alluded to the possibility of the tension,  between academics and advocates. I asserted this tension was something I’d observed, but I didn’t give any specific examples. Partly because of that weakness in the original post, I thought I’d follow up on this topic, using a concrete example of the tension I had in mind.

That example is drawn from a debate I’ve engaged in elsewhere on this blog with Maud Perdriel-Vaissiere, an advisor to the UNCAC Coalition. In brief, the substantive issue that she and I (and others) have been arguing about is the extent to which the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) obligates law enforcement agencies that recover judgments or settlements against bribe-paying firms to share those proceeds with the governments of the countries where the bribes were paid. I won’t go into all the details here. (For those who are interested, some of my earlier posts on the topic can be found here and here, and other contributors to this blog have discussed related issues here, here, here, and here.) In my most recent post on the subject, I specifically criticized Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere’s discussion of the issue in a post she published on the UNCAC Coalition’s blog. Among other criticisms, I accused Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere of failing to make basic distinctions between different types of legal recovery, of failing to acknowledge their different treatment under UNCAC, and of citing misleading statistics that conflated these different forms of recovery. I described the legal analysis in the post as “sloppy” and concluded with some harsh words: “The anticorruption community can and should do better.”

Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere submitted a lengthy, detailed, and thoughtful rebuttal, which you can read in the comments section for the original post. Much of her response focuses on substantive matters where she and I respectfully disagree, and I leave it to interested readers to make their own determinations on those issues. But part of her reply caught my attention because it so nicely illustrates, in a much more concrete form, the “analyst vs. advocate tension” I alluded to generally in my post on the role of academics. Here’s what Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere has to say in my response to my criticism that she cites misleading statistics that don’t take into account the differences between distinct forms of recovery: Continue reading →

Civil Society Combats Corruption: A Review of Shaazka Beyerle’s Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability & Justice

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The now worldwide anticorruption movement remains a creature of its origins:  civil society.  It was Transparency International, a nongovernmental organization, that first gave voice to citizen demands for honest government,  and it is thousands of national and local groups that have put their own “boots on the ground” to demand public officials do something.  Now comes Shaazka Beyerle, Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations, to recount in fascinating and colorful detail some of the recent victories these warriors for an accountable and just government have achieved. Continue reading →

Pre-2012 CPI Scores CANNOT Be Compared Across Time–So Please Stop Doing It!

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OK, I know (as Rick pointed out in a recent post) that a lot — maybe too much — of the content on this blog has focused on measurement issues, so I apologize for yet another post on that topic, but this has really been bugging me:

Transparency International has been publishing its well-known and widely-used Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) since 1995.  The index has its pros and cons, several of which have been discussed on this blog (see here, here, here, here, and here).  But putting other debates about the CPI’s validity and utility to the side, one thing should be perfectly clear: At least prior to 2012 (when TI changed its method and scoring system for the CPI), a country’s CPI scores CANNOT be compared across years.  The fact that Country X scores, say, a 4.4 in 2002, and scores a 4.9 in 2005, does NOT mean that (perceived) corruption has declined in country X.  Maybe it did, but it might have stayed the same, or gotten worse.  At most, the pre-2012 CPI provides information about country’s ranking relative to other countries, within a single year, with respect to corruption perceptions.

TI itself could not be more explicit about this, stating bluntly “CPI scores before 2012 are not comparable over time.”  Yet I keep coming across sources — news articles, presentations by leading international organizations, academic papers — that use year-to-year CPI comparisons to make claims about how corruption in a particular country or region is improving or worsening, or about whether a particular policy intervention is working or not.  YOU CAN’T DO THIS!  PLEASE STOP!!

Continue reading →

Corruption as Culture and Health Care Fraud in Brooklyn

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The astonishing prevalence of health care fraud in the Russian-speaking communities of Brighton Beach and Coney Island in New York City presents an interesting case study on the causes of corruption. The Brighton Beach-Coney Island area is populated by people who immigrated from one of the most corrupt countries in the world to one of the least. You can take the person out of the corrupt system, but does this remove the propensity to engage in corrupt acts from the person?

In the wake of a recent spate of health care fraud scandals in Russian-speaking New York City communities (as well as a scheme to defraud Medicaid perpetuated by dozens of Russian diplomats), the facts and some commentators suggest no. Brighton Beach has the second highest rate of Medicaid and Medicare-related malfeasance in the United States. In February 2012, federal authorities uncovered the largest no-fault insurance fraud scheme in United States history, which was operated out of Brighton Beach-based clinics. A law-enforcement official drew a direct link between “the Russian mind-set” that “if you’re not scamming the government…you’re looked upon as a patsy” and this widespread fraud. Professor Mark Galeotti expanded on this point, suggesting that “from cradle to grave” Russians have been inculcated to “bureaucratic systems that are parasitic and hostile, almost designed to make you pay bribes.”

I think “old habits die hard” as an explanation is too simplistic and uncomfortably resembles notions (discussed elsewhere on this blog) that corruption is an inherent cultural touchstone in certain societies. Furthermore, emerging evidence shows that Russians within Russia are developing a moral aversion to bribery.

An alternative explanation for the puzzle of the Brighton Beach health care fraud phenomenon is below. Under this model, culture is not the only, and perhaps not the first, link in the chain of causation. Continue reading →

Who Cares How Madison and Hamilton Defined “Corruption”?

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We’ve had a few posts in recent weeks on Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout’s ultimately unsuccessful, but surprisingly effective, campaign for the New York governorship (see here and here). Teachout’s campaign has had the side effect of increasing the attention to her scholarly work, most notably her recent book Corruption in America.  Rick has already posted a more general discussion of Teachout’s major thesis regarding the allegedly corrupting effects of money on American democracy (and a follow-up yesterday). I want to touch on a somewhat narrower point, but one that has attracted a great deal of attention: Teachout’s claim that the people who framed and ratified the U.S. Constitution had a much broader understanding of the meaning of “corruption” than is reflected in contemporary U.S. Supreme Court decisions on campaign finance. (I should acknowledge up front that I have not yet had the opportunity to read Teachout’s book, though I have read her earlier article making substantially the same point, as well as an excerpt from the book posted online.)

The basic argument, which Teachout persuasively documents, is that for the founding generation — including leading members like James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, and others — the term “corruption” had a much broader meaning than the exchange of money or other material benefits for official acts; the term instead included an institution’s “improper dependence” on some outside party. My colleague Larry Lessig made this argument the basis of an amicus brief he submitted to the Supreme Court in the McCutcheon case. In his post discussing the brief, Lessig asserts that the evidence of how the term corruption was used in the Founding generation “suggest that only a non-originalist could support the idea that ‘corruption’ refers to ‘quid pro quo’ corruption alone.”

I’m not sure I can improve on Jill Lapore‘s assessment of Teachout and Lessig’s evidence about the historical usage of corruption: “This isn’t uninteresting, but it’s not especially helpful, either.” I agree wholeheartedly. At the risk of belaboring the issue (about which I’ve written before, in the context of the McCutcheon case), let me say a bit more about why I think the evidence that Madison, Hamilton, and other members of the Founding generation used “corruption” in a broader sense is (mostly) irrelevant to contemporary discussions of campaign finance and other issues. Continue reading →

Is Corruption Destroying American Democracy? Zephyr Teachout’s Corruption in America – The Discussion Continues

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Last week I critiqued Fordham University Law Professor Zephyr Teachout’s new book, Corruption in American: From Benjamin Franklin to Citizens United.  Professor Teachout claims that campaign contributions and lobbying by private interests threatens American democracy and drastic reform is urgently needed.  I complained that she was ignoring the current scholarship on the effect of money on American democracy and that it tells a much different story than the one she recounts. Two commentators, Harvard Law Professor John Coates and Dutch Professor Maurits Breul, replied to my critique.  I thank both for prompting me to think harder about Professor Teachout’s book and its arguments.

Having done so, I am even more convinced that the book’s most glaring weakness is its failure to acknowledge, let alone engage with, the current learning on the effects of campaign spending and lobbying and that this omission is fatal to her call for reform. Continue reading →

The Role of Academics in Anticorruption: Some Tensions

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As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts (here and here), I was fortunate enough to attend a conference last month, hosted by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, for academics who write and teach on anticorruption and related subjects. Virna di Palma of TRACE International, who also attended the conference, has posted a very nice overview and discussion of some of the conference themes on the B20 Collective Action Hub’s blog. Ms. di Palma accurately summarizes three main roles that academics can and do play in this field:

  1. Research: “[A]cademic research into the nature of corruption and measures to reduce it is needed … Academics [also] need to challenge existing information on anti-corruption and to filter out low-quality research.”
  2. Activism/advocacy: Professors can serve as “activists and play a firsthand role in shaping public opinion and policy issues.”
  3. Teaching: “Academics educate future policy makers and business executives, directly shaping social, economic and political structures and values…. Academics can influence behavior, promote international standards and norms, counter rationalizations before they become ingrained and mold future leaders.”

I agree with all of this (and I get a warm, fuzzy feeling when someone who is not a professor says something nice about my tribe). But I want to highlight a potential tension between goals 1 and 2 (research and activism/advocacy), and point out how that same tension may play out in the context of goal 3 (teaching). Continue reading →

Is Corruption Destroying American Democracy? Zephyr Teachout’s Corruption in America

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Fordham University Law Professor Zephyr Teachout earned a place of distinction among anticorruption activists for making the fight against corruption the centerpiece of her spirited campaign to oust the incumbent in New York’s September 9 gubernatorial primary (as well as a good deal of attention on this blog, click here and here).  Her effort also deserves special recognition in academia: surely no other professor has produced evidence to undercut her own academic work so fast as Professor Teachout. Appearing days before the primary, her Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin to Citizens United contends that large private donations to political candidates so favor candidates supported by the wealthy that the future of American democracy is at risk.  Yet while preliminary figures suggest the well-known, well-organized incumbent outspent her by somewhere between 40 to 50 to 1, she did surprisingly well, polling 180,336 votes to the incumbent’s 327,150.  If money so dominates American political campaigns, it is hard to see why Professor Teachout got so far with so little. Of course, she did lose the election.  More to the point, even if she had won, her claim that money is overwhelming American elections cannot be dis-proven by a single example.  It may be that her race was an outlier and that most of the time, money does talk.  So what does the accumulated research on the influence of money on American elections show? Continue reading →

UNCAC Does Not Require Sharing of Foreign Bribery Settlement Monies with Host Countries

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Maud Perdriel-Vaissiere, the Advisor on Asset Recovery for the UNCAC Coalition (a global civil society network committed to promoting compliance with the UN Convention Against Corruption) recently published a post on the UNCAC Coaltion blog entitled, “Is there an obligation under the UNCAC to share foreign bribery settlement monies with host countries?” Her answer is yes. Indeed, she says that the contrary position is based on a “gross misreading” of UNCAC, that UNCAC’s asset recovery provisions (in Chapter V) apply even to “stolen or embezzled funds over which foreign governments cannot establish prior ownership” (emphasis hers), and that there is “no doubt [that] there is an obligation under the UNCAC [for supply-side enforcers] to share foreign bribery settlement monies with host countries!” (The exclamation mark is hers as well.)

As readers of this blog may be aware, I think this is wrong, based on a sloppy and tendentious misreading of the language of the treaty. Though I’ve written on this before, I think Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere’s analysis deserves a rebuttal. Continue reading →