Tag Archives: judiciary

Jailing Peru’s Presidents: Why Peru’s Recent Crackdown Isn’t Curbing Corruption

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Peru’s specially made prison for housing disgraced former presidents is full. With an official capacity of two, last year’s extradition of ex-President Pedro Castillo from the United States forced the Barbadillo prison to expand to include three former presidents. The number dropped back down to two following a presidential pardon for ex-President Alberto Fujimori, who passed away shortly after his release. The current prison population is not an anomaly: seven of the eight Peruvian presidents since 1990 are either in jail, have been in jail, or have faced a detention order. Each of them faced corruption charges for graft during their tenure as a public official.

The fact that so many ex-presidents have been incarcerated might be taken as a sign of progress. As Rosa María Palacios, a Peruvian lawyer and political commentator, wryly observed, “In Latin America, people envy us. Many people abroad say: ‘At least you get them in jail.’” Yet despite the fact that Peru has engaged in a crackdown on presidential corruption that is unparalleled among Latin American countries, Peru’s current president is under investigation for “illicit enrichment,” Peru’s ranking on the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) remains low, and 81% of Peruvian citizens believing that corruption has increased in the past five years. 

Of course, nobody expects that prosecuting high-level government officials, even presidents, will solve the corruption problem. But one might expect that demonstrating a willingness to do what so many other systems will not do—go after the most powerful political figures in the country—would at least create a sense of optimism and momentum in the anticorruption fight. Yet this does not seem to have happened in Peru. Why not?

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Can Argentina Prosecute its Leaders Without Dragging Down its Democracy?

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Prosecuting a former leader for corruption is no easy task, but it is one that a lot of countries have had to undertake. In fact, since 1980, roughly half of the world’s nations have seen their former leaders jailed or prosecuted. The vast majority of those cases involved corruption charges.

Argentina has been in this situation quite a few times. Most recently, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner—the country’s ex-president and current vice-president—has been standing trial for having allegedly diverted state funds to a friend through fraudulent public works contracts. This seems like a victory for rule of law. But with the divisiveness and instability that the process has caused, it’s not clear whether the prosecution of Kirchner has done more good than harm. Because this is probably not the last corruption case that Argentinian authorities will bring against a former leader, enforcers should learn from the problems that have arisen from the Kirchner investigation.

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Reminder: Workshop on Specialized Anticorruption Courts Starting Imminently! Join Us on Zoom!

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As I mentioned in my announcement last Friday, the Christian Michelsen Institute is hosting hosting a panel today, which I will be moderating. on specialized anticorruption courts, featuring panelists Sofie Schütte, Olha Nikolaieva, Marta Mochulska, and Ivan Gunjic. The panel starts in half an hour (at 8 am US East Coast time/2 pm Bergen time), and it is possible to join by Zoom. I hope some of you out there will join us, as I think, based on the quality of the panelists and the inherent interest of the topic, that it should be a good discussion.

Online Workshop on Specialized Anticorruption Courts

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This coming Monday, November 14th, the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway will be hosting a panel on specialized anticorruption courts, which I will be moderating. The outstanding panel includes Sofie Schütte, a Senior Adviser at CMI’s U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, Olha Nikolaieva, a Legal and Judicial Adviser for USAID, Professor Marta Mochulska of Lviv National University, and Ivan Gunjic, a PhD Candidate at the University of Zurich. The one-hour panel will start at 8 am US East Coast time (2 pm Bergen time), and it is possible to join by Zoom. The official panel description (also available here) is as follows:

Anti-corruption courts are an increasingly common feature of national anti-corruption reform strategies. By mid-2022 the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre at CMI counted 27 such courts across Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Reasons for their creation include the resolution of backlogs but also concerns about the ability of ordinary courts to handle corruption cases impartially. While there are no definitive best practices for specialised anti-corruption courts, existing models and experience provide some guidance to reformers considering the creation of similar institutions.

In this panel discussion we launch an update of “Specialised anti-corruption courts: A comparative mapping” and discuss experiences with the establishment of anti-corruption courts in Eastern Europe and Ukraine in particular.

Explaining (the Lack of) Corruption in the US Federal Judiciary

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The United States judiciary has a history with corruption. Corruption pervaded every aspect of pre-revolution America, from the customs enforcers up to the colonial judges. Corruption in the United States only worsened a century after the Revolution, with politicians during the late 19th century taking “spectacularly handsome bribes from corporations and demand[ing] kickbacks as the helping hand they extended often came with an open palm.” Early twentieth century America, in many ways, had systemic corruption similar to that seen in modern developing countries. Even as recently as the early 2000s, state judges have come under fire for not only individual corruption, but pervasive, systemic corruption rings. Outright bribery is only one problem: state judges have also been known to engage in misappropriation of public resources, nepotism in appointing counsel, and “skimming off the top.”

Yet in spite of the environment around them, the federal judiciary—more or less since day one—has been mostly corruption-free. As Professor Mathew Stephenson observed, even during the quite corrupt nineteenth century, “at least at the federal level, the institutions of justice—courts and prosecutors—seemed relatively clean and basically functional.” If anything, the federal judiciary, and federal prosecutors, have served as a check on corruption at the state and local level, “particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century.” This pattern continues into the present day: Although the federal judiciary comprises 5% of all judges in the United States, they only account for 0.2% of known cases of judicial bribery.

This raises a question: How did the federal judiciary remain relatively free from corruption, especially during the first century of the country’s existence, when corruption pervaded so many aspects of American society, including state and local courts? There are two broad categories of explanation: historical and structural. These are not mutually exclusive alternatives; rather, the historical and structural explanations complement one another.

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In Mexico, Justice Will Remain a Family Matter

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Judicial corruption in Mexico is a pervasive problem. And while high-level scandals tend to grab the headlines (see, for example, here, here, and here), much of the corruption is more pedestrian. While the causes of Mexico’s judicial corruption problem are various and complex, one persistent contributing factor is the endemic nepotism throughout the judiciary.

Of the more than 50 types of position in the judicial branch (including both judgeships and various administrative positions), only two—federal circuit and district court judgeships—use a competitive merit-based hiring process. For the rest, judges can choose whom they please, with little oversight. Moreover, once hired, these individuals have an insurmountable advantage in promotion in the judiciary, given that most job postings (and, informally, judgeships) require that the candidate have previous experience in the judicial branch. And even with respect to circuit and district judgeships, which are supposed to be filled through an open and merit-based competitive selection process run by a body called the Federal Judicial Council (CJF), in practice the CJF often creates “special” vacancies with different criteria (in effect, lower standards).

As a result of all this, nepotism in judicial hiring and promotion is pervasive, as judges are able to secure positions for friends and family. At least 51% of Mexico’s judges and magistrates are related to someone else working in the judiciary, with that number as high as 80% in some states. (To take one particularly egregious but not totally anomalous example, in one judge’s chambers, 17 employees were related to the judge.) This nepotism is not only corrupt in itself, but it also contributes to other forms of corruption. For one thing, corrupt judges can appoint those who will participate in, or at least be complicit in, corrupt practices—in some cases appointing individuals recommended by organized crime groups. But even when such deliberate wrongdoing is not the issue, untrained or unprofessional judicial bureaucrats and judges are more susceptible to corruption, and more likely to create the kinds of delays and inefficiencies in the system that both invite and obscure corrupt actions.

There hadn’t been much appetite in the Mexican Government to address the judicial nepotism problem until reform-minded President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar took office. Since February 2020, both men have been enthusiastically lobbying for a judicial reform package deemed the most ambitious since 1994. This bill, overwhelmingly passed by the Mexican Senate and Chamber of Deputies in recent months, is a behemoth, with a variety of significant structural changes to the judicial branch. Among these many reforms are several measures designed, at least in part, to address the problem of judicial nepotism: Continue reading →

South Korea’s Moment for Chaebol Reform is Now

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In late 2016, South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed from office following revelations of massive corruption in her government. While the scandal included plenty of sensational and salacious material, the core accusations involved improper quid pro quo relations between the Park administration and several chaebols—the massive, dynastically controlled business conglomerates that are the cornerstones of the South Korean economy. Following impeachment, President Park and several senior officials in her administration were arrested, tried, and convicted for a variety of offenses, including bribery, abuse of power, and coercion. In the aftermath of this massive scandal, new President Moon Jae-in swept into office with a commanding majority and a pledge to clean up the mess by instituting strong anticorruption reforms.

However, most of President Moon’s anticorruption initiatives have received mixed reviews at best. For example, President Moon’s proposed Anti-Corruption Agency, though authorized by parliament in December 2019, has yet to be established, and has been roundly criticized for its potential to be used to suppress political opponents. And President Moon’s attempt to exert more centralized control over prosecutors was derided by critics as a retaliatory measure against prosecutors investigating government corruption. But perhaps the greatest disappointment of the Moon administration’s approach to anticorruption is its reluctance to target the root of the country’s most serious corruption problem: the unchecked power of the chaebols. Though President Moon announced chaebol reform as a platform priority, his actions since his election have borne little fruit.

That chaebols were at the center of the Park administration scandal is neither surprising nor unusual. Indeed, chaebols have been at the center of South Korea’s most significant grand corruption cases, and they are routinely implicated in scandal after scandal after scandal. But neither the chaebols themselves nor their senior executives face a meaningful risk of significant liability. Even when prosecutors bring cases, chaebols and their executives benefit from judicial leniency, a phenomenon that has been documented both anecdotally and quantitatively. Indeed, South Korean high courts are infamous for overturning stricter lower court sentences in favor of what has come to be known as the “three-five” rule, available exclusively for chaebol executives: a guilty chaebol executive typically receives a three-year prison sentence, suspended for five years, and subsequently commuted—meaning that the executive serves no prison time. There are two likely explanations for this unusual and counterproductive judicial leniency toward chaebols and their executives. Continue reading →

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Claudia Escobar

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Claudia Escobar, a former Magistrate Judge on the Court of Appeals in Guatemala. Judge Escobar resigned her position in 2014 after exposing corruption in the judicial selection process. Judge Escobar secretly recorded a meeting with representatives of the then-ruling party, who indicated that she would be promoted if she ruled in favor of the government in an important upcoming case. Judge Escobar subsequently released the recordings, and fled Guatemala for fear of reprisals. Since then, she has been working in the United States as a researcher, consultant, and advocate, with a focus on fighting judicial corruption in Guatemala and elsewhere in the Americas.

Our interview begins with a discussion of how Guatemala’s history, including more than 36 years of civil war, has created a culture of impunity and insecurity, and how the challenges this legacy poses to the creation of a genuinely impartial and honest judicial system. Judge Escobar describes many of the problems with Guatemala’s current judicial appointment system, and the associated corruption risks. Our conversation then turned to the impact and legacy of the UN-backed anti-impunity commission, known by its Spanish acronym CICIG. Judge Escobar offers her perspective on the fight against corruption under former President Jimmy Morales and new President Alejandro Giammattei, as well as a more general discussion of the politics of anticorruption in Guatemala and the prospects for future progress on this issue.

You can find this episode here. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Anticorruption Court Rulings as a Gentle Reminder to Voters: Candidates’ Integrity Is Important

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One of the great paradoxes in the research on corruption in democracies—and one of the great sources of frustration for anticorruption activists—is that while large majorities of voters consistently claim that they detest corruption and would be less likely to support corrupt politicians, nonetheless politicians credibly accused of corruption regularly win elections. There are many possible explanations for this, including the possibilities that voters lack sufficient information about corruption allegations against candidates, or that voters ultimately prioritize other factors. Yet another possibility—similar to yet distinct from these familiar explanations—is that even if voters are generally aware of corruption allegations against certain politicians, when the time comes to vote, other issues are more salient in many citizens’ minds, and integrity concerns fade into the background.

That last explanation implies that if concerns about politicians’ integrity were made more salient shortly before the election—even if the focus was on political corruption generally, or on corruption in some other jurisdiction—then voters would be less inclined to support politicians suspected of corruption. In a recent article, titled Can Institutions Make Voters Care about Corruption?, Omer Yair, Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan, and Yoav Dotan find that this may indeed be the case, and further suggest that if high-profile institutions—such as courts—take actions that raise the salience of corruption and integrity issues shortly before an election, this can lead voters to place more weight on such considerations when casting their ballots. Continue reading →

Ukraine’s Bold Experiment: The Role of Foreign Experts in Selecting Judges for the New Anticorruption Court

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The fight against corruption has been a central focus for Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan Revolution. In the immediate aftermath of Maidan, the country created four new institutions, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) (an investigative body), the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) (with prosecutorial powers), the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) (responsible for administering the e-asset declaration system), and the Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA) (tasked with recovering stolen assets). Yet the problem of impunity for grand corruption has persisted, and many believe that the weak link in the chain has been the Ukrainian judiciary. In addition to familiar problems of delay and inefficiency, Ukrainian judges are widely viewed as susceptible to political influence, and even corrupt themselves. To address this problem, in 2018—thanks to the combined lobbying efforts of Ukraine’s vibrant civil society and pressure from international donors, primarily the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—Ukraine enacted a new law creating a specialized anticorruption court known as the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC), which began operations this past September.

The most innovative and controversial feature of this new court is the inclusion of foreign experts in the judicial selection process. While many countries have created specialized anticorruption courts, and many of these have special judicial selection systems that differ from the procedures for appointing ordinary judges, the participation of foreign experts in the HACC judicial selection process was unprecedented. Yet both domestic civil society groups and outside actors like the IMF and the Venice Commission (the Council of Europe’s advisory body for legal and constitutional matters) came to see foreign participation in the selection of HACC judges as crucial, particularly in light of the controversial selection process for judges to Ukraine’s Supreme Court in 2017. In the selection to the Supreme Court, multiple candidates were approved by Ukraine’s High Council of Justice (HCJ) despite the fact that those candidates were found to be ethically tainted by the Public Integrity Council (PIC), a civil society watchdog that assists the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ) in assessing the integrity of judicial candidates. Thus, when lobbying for the HACC, civil society and some members of parliament demanded that the law guarantee the presence of foreign experts with the power to veto judicial candidates, in order to ensure that no judges were appointed to the HACC if there was reasonable doubt about their integrity.

As a short-term stopgap, the involvement of foreign experts in the HACC judge selection is promising and may even serve as a useful model for other institutional reforms within Ukraine, and for other countries. But reliance on foreign experts to address concerns about selecting judges (or other officials) of sufficient integrity is probably not a long-term solution. Continue reading →