Tag Archives: National Democratic Institute

Guest Post: Model Open Government Partnership Commitments for Fighting Kleptocracy

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Today’s guest post is from Jodi Vittori, Professor of Practice at Georgetown University:

This past January, I authored a report, co-sponsored by the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the National Democratic Institute, entitled “Committing to Combat Kleptocracy: A Guide for Open Government Partnership Members.” The report explains how various kleptocrats and their “enablers” move illicit assets from the country where they were stolen to the locations where they will be stored and enjoyed. The report also discusses how kleptocracy undermines not only the countries where the assets were stolen, but also the transit or destination points for kleptocratic money, people, and other resources.  While it might seem like an infusion of money, assets, and rich people into a given country might be a benefit for that country (putting aside the moral issues), it turns out that these inflows have real drawbacks for the host state, contributing to governance backsliding, facilitating real estate manipulation and industrial asset stripping, exacerbating migration challenges, and undermining national security. The role of Russia’s kleptocracy in election interference in the West, as well as the corruption associated with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, have helped put the role kleptocratic inflows play in receiving states in the spotlight.

The OGP’s open government principles—to which all OGP member governments commit—are a set of norms that, if honored and implemented, will help countries fight back against inflows of kleptocratic assets. At the most basic level, the OGP stresses the importance of making relevant, usable, and timely information on governments available to citizens and civil society to hold their governments accountable. This helps ensure that public resources are managed transparently, fairly, and equitably. The report develops this further by outlining a series of model OGP commitments for consideration by governments and citizen activists, including the following: Continue reading →

New Resource Guide on Corruption Risk Assessment of Legislation

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As a too-familiar cliché has it, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and this is a message many in the anticorruption community have taken to heart. But talking in general terms about the  importance of preventing corruption is one thing; figuring out how to design specific, practical anticorruption measures is a much greater challenge. Among the preventative tools in the anticorruption toolkit, one that has shown some promise in a number of countries, and that has attracted attention in many others, is the pre-enactment analysis of proposed laws to assess the corruption risks associated with those laws. This process is sometimes referred to as “corruption risk assessment” (CRA). (It is also—rather unfortunately—sometimes referred to as the “corruption-proofing” of proposed legislation, a label that vastly oversells what this sort of assessment is capable of doing.) We have had a couple of posts on this technique on the blog previously (see here and here).

Last month, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) published a useful resource guide on CRA intended primarily for parliaments (and other legislative bodies), authored by GAB’s own senior contributor Rick Messick. (Full disclosure: I provided some comments on a very early draft of the guide, and I also worked as a consultant, though in a comparatively minor role, on a related project with the NDI’s Bangkok office.) To quote from the introduction, this guide “suggests how a CRA procedure can be incorporated into the standing rules of parliament and provides a checklist of issues the CRA should consider…. While primarily written for stakeholders in parliament, the guide can be adapted for use by anti-corruption agencies, executive branch agencies, civil society organizations (CSO) and other groups to detect and highlight the corruption risks that exist in legislative processes.”

The link above goes to the NDI page with information about the guide and related documents. You can also go directly to a PDF of the guide itself here. I hope some of our readers find this to be a useful resource.