Guest Post: “Global Cities–Joining Forces Against Corruption” Conference Recap, Part 2

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Jennifer Rodgers and Gabriel Kuris, the Executive Director and Deputy Director, respectively, of the Columbia University Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (CAPI), have provided a two-part series of guest posts summarizing CAPI’s conference on “Global Cities–Joining Forces Against Corruption”, which we previously advertised on GAB. This is the second of the two posts. (Part 1 can be found here.)

The CAPI “Global Cities” conference featured two speakers who discussed their own experience working to promote strong municipal anticorruption enforcement, though there could hardly be a wider gulf in the circumstances they currently face. Commissioner Mark Peters of the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) talked about about his office’s strong history of combating not only corruption but waste and mismanagement in NYC government, and Lev Pidlisetskyy of Ukraine’s Parliament gave an inside account of the incredible challenges his brand-new political party faces in fighting the massive and entrenched corruption left over from the Yanukovich era by instituting reforms in the judiciary, decentralizing authority, and engaging the public through new transparency tools

The panel discussion on “Engaging the Public: Mobilizing Citizens, Civil Society, and the Media” looked at the how cities can effectively partner with outside entities to better fight corruption. Athanasios Tsiouras of the Athens Mayor’s Office described Athens’ sophisticated and award-winning online platform for disbursing important information and collecting citizen complaints. Jose Ramon Amieva of the Mexico City Mayor’s Office spoke about major efforts to streamline local government processes like obtaining permits and licenses. And Fuad Khoury, the Comptroller General of Peru, discussed his office’s unique Young Auditors Program, which enlists students and teachers nationwide to help root out corruption, waste, and inefficiency. Dick Dadey, of Citizens Union of the City of New York, provided a civil society perspective, encouraging city governments to utilize networks of good government groups to make change. And Jeri Powell of New York City’s DOI took a historical view, emphasizing the importance of gaining the public’s trust in fighting corruption.

The next panel, “Game Changing Cases: An Inside Look at Breakthrough Investigations” featured prosecutors from all over the world discussing some major law enforcement successes, as well as the challenges they confront. A leading prosecutor from Venice explained a highly successful case in which 50 defendants, including a sitting mayor, were arrested for corruption offenses. New York federal prosecutors generated a lively discussion by describing a bribery case against a sitting state legislator, charged after another legislator agreed to cooperate with authorities and wear a recording device during his interactions with his colleague. A leader from the Catalan antifraud office described working on a variety of cases that help local officials build their own integrity systems. And a Malaysian prosecutor explained how a major case, built up during an extensive and lengthy investigation, was derailed by a defendant’s suicide while in custody.

Finally, “Ensuring a Clean Clean-Up: Fighting Fraud in the Wake of Disaster” provided an illuminating and instructive look at corruption risks related to major events that city governments should plan for to avoid making a bad situation worse. A member of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana spoke about how his office got up and running in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and what they would do differently today. Steve Lee, the Acting Director of the Department of Consumer Affairs of New Jersey, drew practical lessons from what kinds of consumer frauds his office has handled since Hurricane Sandy. And Alan Brill from Kroll provided a fascinating look at how easily criminals can steal unwitting citizens’ identities by setting up bogus free wifi sites, and how we can better protect ourselves against this kind of fraud.

From Perth to Barcelona, from Lima to Toronto, cities have become crucial battlefields in the fight against corruption. The citizens of the world’s growing urban majority are demanding fair and honest services from local governments, putting cities on the vanguard of public integrity enforcement and innovation. CAPI’s inaugural Global Cities conference made a compelling case that the international anticorruption community can learn from the voices of the local practitioners, policymakers, and public citizens working to clean up city halls worldwide. Interested readers can learn more about the conference from the online  videos, presentation slideshows, and other conference materials. And don’t forget to register now for CAPI’s upcoming online discussion forum on which we’ll soon be dissecting what we learned at Global Cities in greater detail with the participants!

The U.S. Indictments of FIFA’s Corrupt Officials Are Legally, Morally, and Politically Justified

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For avid soccer fans and students of anticorruption, last week’s announcement that top FIFA officials had been indicted by U.S. authorities was not all that shocking. Commentators on this blog have been documenting FIFA’s collision course with the criminal justice system for some time now (see here, here, and here). But as American law comes to bear on the world’s most powerful sporting organization, it has caught the attention of millions. The reaction of many has been a wry “How fitting? The Americans going after soccer, and relying on tenuous legal reasoning to boot.”

Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman articulated the critique in a recent Bloomberg article, entitled “The U.S. is Treating FIFA Like the Mafia.” Feldman’s overarching point is that, while FIFA may be a problematic organization, the U.S. enforcement action reflects dubious politics more than genuine legal interest. Professor Feldman raises three main objections to the DOJ’s indictments–focused, respectively, on the law, policy, and politics of the indictments. First, with respect to the law, he casts doubt on the legal basis for prosecuting FIFA officials under the U.S. Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), given that the alleged offenses occurred on foreign soil, and suggests more generally that the entire case is absurd because RICO is designed to go after organized criminal enterprises, not sporting organizations like FIFA (or groups within FIFA). Second, Professor Feldman contends that, as a matter of policy, even if the U.S. has a sound legal basis for prosecution, exercising its jurisdiction in this case is inappropriate due to the lack of a strong U.S. interest in misconduct within FIFA, given that the U.S. cares much less about soccer than most other countries do. Third, and related to the preceding point, Professor Feldman suggests that the political fallout from the indictments is likely to be damaging to the U.S. He argues that the underlying premise of the RICO action–that FIFA (or a group within FIFA) is a criminal enterprise–is “incendiary,” and will be viewed as an imperialistic power play by the United States against soccer’s true fan-base (a.k.a, the rest of the world).

In my view, Professor Feldman is wrong on the law, shortsighted about the scope of U.S. interests in the alleged criminal conduct, and overly pessimistic about the political repercussions of the U.S. action. If the facts alleged can be proven, the U.S. is legally, morally, and politically justified in treating the indicted FIFA officials as RICO offenders.

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Guest Post: “Global Cities–Joining Forces Against Corruption” Conference Recap, Part 1

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Jennifer Rodgers and Gabriel Kuris, the Executive Director and Deputy Director, respectively, of the Columbia University Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (CAPI), have provided a two-part series of guest posts summarizing CAPI’s recent conference on “Global Cities–Joining Forces Against Corruption”, which we previously advertised on GAB. This is the first of the two posts.

CAPI’s “Global Cities” conference brought together delegations from 14 cities across six continents to discuss the corruption challenges in urban settings and new ideas for reform. Videos of each speech and panel, presentation slideshows, and other conference materials are now available online. The discussion will continue on an online forum launching soon on the CAPI website, and those interested in participating in these online exchanges should feel welcome to register now. CAPI plans to periodically reprise the conference, with a shifting roster of cities, to build a coalition of cities on the vanguard of fighting urban corruption.

The conference commenced with keynotes addresses by the mayors of two historic cities working to boost transparency and public trust: Miguel Ángel Mancera of Mexico City and Giorgos Kaminis of Athens. Both mayors emphasized the empowerment of everyday citizens through new oversight mechanisms, cooperation with civil society, and emerging technologies—like Athens’s online budget monitoring tool. Both cities are also working to streamline legal regulations and public procedures, whether through Athens’s one-stop shops for citizen services or Mexico City’s legal reforms in public procurement and property registration.

The first panel, “The Shifting Landscape of Urban Corruption: New Challenges, New Approaches” examined the corruption issues cities currently face worldwide. Leaders of Western Australia’s Corruption and Crime Commission discussed their development of a “Misconduct Intelligence Assessment” tool to track the dynamic corruption risks of the modern boomtown of Perth. Chicago’s Inspector General spoke about emerging challenges such as the increasing prominence of quasi-governmental entities, the changing role of money in politics, and the grey areas of “legalized corruption.” Leaders from the anticorruption agencies of Catalonia and Kenya discussed the intersection between corruption, civic ethics, and public procurement.

The second panel, “Comeback Cities: Restoring Integrity after a Corruption Scandal”, covered the efforts of Toronto, Philadelphia, and New Orleans to break out of ceaseless cycles of scandal and clean-up to build resilient structures of oversight and civic cultures of lawfulness. Toronto’s Accountability Framework pioneered a new integrity model in a city reeling from a procurement scandal. Philadelphia’s Inspector General helped the city recover from high-level corruption so rampant the FBI wire-tapped the mayor’s office. Federal oversight is helping New Orleans to finally overhaul its notoriously corrupt police department. At the end of the panel, Frank Anechiarico of Hamilton College brought in comparative experience from Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and New York City from the volume he co-edited about city-level anti-corruption structures, Local Integrity Systems.

The third panel, “Bridging Political Boundaries: Partnering with National and State Government”, provoked some of the conference’s most engaged discussions. An aide to the mayor of Lviv, Ukraine, discussed how local activists whose reforms were frustrated by corruption at the national level helped upend national politics. Delegates from Nairobi and Chicago discussed collaboration between federal, regional, and local levels of law enforcement. Finally, GAB Senior Contributor Rick Messick brought an international-level perspective, emphasizing the counter-intuitive benefits of competition, rather than cooperation, among overlapping levels of government.

In our next post, we will summaraize the conference’s other speeches and panels, on topics ranging from the fight against corruption in post-Maidan Ukraine to the risks posed by cybercrime rings when cities host major events.

Shoddy Craftsmanship: How Not to Design an Independent Prosecutor

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There is a reason that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has graced the pages of the Global Anticorruption Blog so many times in recent months (see here, here, here, and here): life just isn’t easy for a candidate who campaigns on promises to clean up politics only to drown in allegations once in office. Today I offer another installment in our (entirely unofficial) series on the trials and tribulations of New York’s Governor: “Designed to Fail: Andrew Cuomo’s Interactive Guide to Building an Independent Anticorruption Prosecutor. (Parts Sold Separately).”

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The Problem With Framing Freedom From Corruption as a Human Right

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It is widely recognized that corruption and human rights violations are linked. Corruption, after all, facilitates the violation of human rights–not only civil and political rights, but social and economic rights as well. (This blog has previously discussed those linkages here and here.) Some scholars and activists have gone further, arguing that freedom from official corruption is itself a human right. A useful recent example is a Brookings Paper by attorney Matthew Murray and Professor (and occasional GAB guest contributor) Andrew Spalding, but they are not alone. Advocates of this position claim that reframing corruption as a human rights violation is needed to instill a greater sense of obligation among national governments and to promote more robust enforcement.

I am skeptical. I do not deny the deep connection between human rights and anticorruption, particularly in developing countries, where access to basic human rights such as food, shelter, water, and education, is often hampered by rampant corruption. But I do not think that trying to establish “freedom from official corruption” as a human right per se (as opposed to recognizing the ways in which corruption contributes to human rights violations and other egregious social harms) is a productive use of time and energy.

Let me first summarize what I take to be the core arguments in favor of establishing freedom from corruption as a human right, and then explain why I respectfully disagree. Continue reading →

Behind the Scenes at GAB [Warning: Self-Indulgent and Self-Congratulatory]

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As the warning in the post title indicates, this post is not about a substantive corruption topic, but rather about the Global Anticorruption Blog itself—in particular, the contributors who make the blog possible, and some behind-the-scenes detail on how they develop their posts. As many of our readers may know, close to half of our posts are written by students at Harvard Law School—though referring them to them as students is somewhat misleading, as they all had extensive experience working on issues related to corruption, international development, and related issues before coming to law school. Recently Harvard Law Today (the school’s alumni magazine) did an article on the “anticorruption lab course” in which these students help one another develop, discuss, and refine their posts. I wanted to feature that piece for two reasons (besides shameless self-congratulation). First, today is Harvard Law School’s commencement ceremony, so I thought it would be fitting to use today’s post, and the link to the article, to thank GAB’s student contributors, particularly those who are graduating and moving on to bigger and better things. Second, and perhaps somewhat less parochially, perhaps the Harvard Law Today piece might be of interest to those among our readers, especially those who are university educators, who would like to explore ways to use blog platforms and related forums to help students develop and disseminate their research, on anticorruption and other topics.

We will return to our regularly scheduled series of substantive posts tomorrow.

Raising the Ethics Bar: Namibia’s President Voluntarily Discloses His Income and Assets

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Namibia is not the first country that comes to mind when looking for international trend setters.  Roughly the size of Turkey but with a population of only 2.1 million, it has been an independent state for just 25 years.  Yet thanks to a recent initiative by its newly installed President, Hage Geingob, the country could become a leader in the worldwide struggle to combat corruption.  On May 21 the President voluntarily disclosed his income and assets and those of his spouse.  The disclosure is an effort to prod Namibia’s public servants to follow his example, but if President Geingob’s precedent setting move prompts other heads of state, in Africa and elsewhere, to voluntarily disclose details of their personal finances, the country may long be remembered for its contribution to the international movement to curb corruption.

As important as the disclosure are the actions the President took in connection with it, actions other heads of state seeking to emulate him should take as well.  Continue reading →

Crowdsourcing Anticorruption–New Essay in The Guardian

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Regular GAB contributor Christopher Crawford–who has written a number of insightful posts on the potential and limitations of social media and information technology in combating corruption (see here and here)–has a new essay on The Guardian‘s website entitled, “Crowdsourcing anti-corruption: Like Yelp, but for bad governments.” Chris is too modest to promote this himself, so I’ll do it for him. Anyone interested in this topic should check out the essay by clicking on the prior link.

South Korea’s Corruption Crisis: Sung Wan-jong’s List and Its Fallout

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The South Korean political scene is embroiled in a sensational corruption scandal–one that erupted when Sung Wan-jong, a successful businessman whose company was facing financial problems, was found dead (he had hanged himself), holding onto a note containing the names of South Korean officials he had bribed, and the amounts involved. In this note–now known as “Sung Wan-jong’s list”–Mr. Sung wrote that he gave 700 million won (US$639,971) to former Presidential Chief of Staff Huh Tae-yeol, 300 million won (US$274,273) to Incheon Mayor Yoo Jeong-bok, 100 million won (US$91,424) to South Gyeongsang Province Governor Hong Joon-pyo, and 200 million won (US$182,849) to Busan Mayor Suh Byung-soo. Moreover, shortly before he committed suicide, Mr. Sung gave an interview in which he claimed to have passed on bribes of 30 million Korean Won ($27,390) to Prime Minister Lee Wan Koo and 200 million Won ($182,600) to Hong Moon Jong. Since then, the press has consistently followed up with updates and new evidence related to the bribery rising to the surface.

All eight of the figures Mr. Sung accused of accepting bribes have denied the allegations. Investigations are currently still in process. (Reports indicate that progress has been made on gathering necessary evidence to indict Governor Hong Joon-pyo for violating the political funds act. The next target in line is likely to be former Prime Minister Lee Wan Koo, who (perhaps ironically) had led the fight against corruption upon his appointment as Prime Minister just a few months ago.) Still, the accusations are deeply troubling, given that the accused figures are powerful leaders in domestic politics, and Mr. Sung’s list, if it proves accurate, could be evidence of an entirely contaminated political system that could potentially reach the top of the pyramid in South Korean politics. Moreover, the accusations, if corroborated, could also potentially shatter the legitimacy of the 2012 presidential election, particularly given that Mr. Sung alleges that the bribes he paid to Mr. Hong were to be spent for President Park Geun Hye’s presidential election campaign.

Of course, we must be careful not to leap to conclusions—and as a legal matter, these officials are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Nonetheless, given the seriousness and sensational nature of the accusations, and the threat they pose to the legitimacy of the entire South Korean political system, I would advocate two unusual measures in connection with the investigation and potential prosecution of these cases (and similar cases that might arise in the future): Continue reading →

Why Bob McDonnell’s Bribery Conviction Should Be Affirmed

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One of the most high-profile public corruption cases in the United States in the last couple of years (and alas, there’s some competition for that honor) is that of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell—a case that both Rick and Jordan have written insightfully about before. Governor McDonnell was convicted of violating federal anticorruption laws by accepting cash, loans, and lavish gifts from a local businessman, Jonnie Williams, in exchange for helping Mr. Williams secure research studies of his dietary supplement product at state institutions. Governor McDonnell assisted Mr. Williams’ efforts by arranging meetings, recommending that other state officials meet with Mr. Williams about his product (using language indicating that Governor McDonnell supported and encouraged use of the product), and encouraging state officials to arrange for the research studies sought by Mr. Williams.

Governor McDonnell appealed his conviction, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments in his appeal last week. (I can’t find a written transcript online yet, but you can listen to an audio recording of the argument here.) The governor’s primary argument on appeal is that he did not violate the relevant federal statutes because he did not perform any “official acts” on behalf of Mr. Williams. Interestingly, Governor McDonnell’s appeal has attracted support from a broad range of criminal law experts, including my Harvard Law School colleagues Professor (and retired Judge) Nancy Gertner and Professor Charles Ogletree. Judge Gertner and Professor Ogletree, along with Virginia Law School Professor John Jeffries, filed an amicus brief contending, in essence: (1) the things that Mr. Williams got from Governor McDonnell were not specific government decisions, but rather “access and ingratiation,” which do not count as “official acts,” and which the Supreme Court has said are not corrupt; (2) the broader definition of “official acts” accepted by the trial court (and reflected in its jury instructions) would render the anti-bribery statutes at issue so broad and vague as to violate constitutional Due Process rights.

Judge Gertner, Professor Ogletree, and Professor Jeffries are among the most distinguished criminal law experts in the United States. They have decades of experience practicing and writing about these issues at the highest levels, whereas I’m a comparative novice in this area, with zero practice experience. If they think one thing, and I think another, it would probably be a smart bet that they’re right and I’m wrong. All that said, I disagree quite strongly with the analysis in their brief.

A blog post is not the place to get into a detailed discussion of the nuances of the law, and this issue may seem rather parochial, especially to our non-American readers. But I actually think that the main problems with the Gertner-Ogletree-Jeffries (GOJ) brief stem from an important conceptual confusion that has implications well beyond this case, and perhaps outside of the U.S. as well. So with full recognition that I’m risking personal embarassment in advancing what might turn out to be a misguided critique, let me explain why I found the GOJ brief (and Governor McDonnell’s lawyer’s arguments along the same lines) unconvincing: Continue reading →