Tag Archives: U4 Center

Specialized Anticorruption Courts: The Updated U4 Paper and Panel

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Last month, I posted an announcement regarding a panel, which I moderated, at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, on specialized anticorruption courts, which was held in conjunction with the release of the updated U4 Issue paper on that topic. (The original paper, which I coauthored with U4 Senior Advisor Sofie Schütte, was published in 2016.) Several readers who were not able to attend the livestream of the panel expressed interest in seeing the video recording, and I am pleased to say that the video is now available here.

The description of the panel, as it appears in the U4 website linked above, is as follows: Continue reading →

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.

Guest Post: Contesting the Narrative of Anticorruption Failure

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Today’s guest post is from Robert Barrington, currently a professor of practice at the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption, who previously served as the executive director of Transparency International UK, where he worked for over a decade.

I have read with great interest the recent exchange of views between Professor Bo Rothstein and Professor Matthew Stephenson on the academic study of corruption and anticorruption. As an anticorruption practitioner who now works within an academic research center, I was particularly struck by how their exchange (Professor Rothstein’s initial post, Professor Stephenson’s critique, and Professor Rothstein’s reply) surfaced some extremely important issues for anticorruption scholarship, its purposes, and its relationship to anticorruption practice.

I find it hard to agree with Professor Rothstein’s analysis, but this is before even looking at his points of difference with Professor Stephenson. My main beef with Professor Rothstein’s analysis is with his starting assumption of widespread failure. Like so many prominent scholars who study corruption, he proceeds from the premise that pretty much all of the anticorruption reform activity over the last generation has failed. He asserts that “[d]espite huge efforts from international development organizations, we have seen precious little success combating corruption,” that anticorruption reform efforts have been a “huge policy failure,” and sets out to explain “[w]hy …  so many anti-corruption programs [have] not delivered[.]” Professor Rothstein then offers three main answers, which Professor Stephenson criticizes.

In taking this downbeat view, Professor Rothstein is not alone. The scholarship of failure on this subject lists among its adherents many of the most prominent academic voices in the field. Professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi has framed as a central question in corruption scholarship, “[W]hy do so many anticorruption reform initiatives fail?” Professor Michael Johnston asserts that “the results of anticorruption reform initiatives, with very few exceptions, have been unimpressive, or even downright counter-productive.” Professor Paul Heywood, notable for the nuance he generally brings to anticorruption analysis, asserts that there has been a “broad failure of anticorruption policies” in developing and developed countries alike. And many scholars proceed to reason backwards from that starting point of failure: If anticorruption reform efforts have been an across-the-board failure, it must be because anticorruption practitioners are doing things in the wrong way, which is because they are proceeding from an entirely wrongheaded set of premises. The principal problems identified by these scholars, perhaps not coincidentally, are those where academics might have a comparative advantage over practitioners: use of the wrong definition of corruption, use of the wrong social science framework to understand corruption, and (as Professor Rothstein puts it) locating corruption in the “wrong social spaces.”

That so many distinguished scholars have advanced something like this assessment makes me wary, as a practitioner, of offering a different view. But I do see things differently. In my view, both the initial assessment (that anticorruption reform efforts have been an across-the-board failure) and the diagnosis (that this failure is due to practitioners not embracing the right definitions and theories) are incorrect; they are more than a little unfair, and potentially harmful. I want to emphasize that different take should not be considered as an attack on eminent scholars, but a genuine effort to tease out why, when presented with the same evidence, some academics see failure, while many practitioners see success. Here goes: Continue reading →

How Reliable Are Global Quantitative Corruption Statistics? A New U4 Report Suggests the Need for Caution

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Those who work in the anticorruption field are likely familiar with the frequent citation of quantitative estimates of the amount and impact of global corruption. Indeed, it has become commonplace for speeches and reports about the corruption problem to open with such statistics—including, for example, the claim that approximately US$1 trillion in bribes are paid each year, the claim that corruption costs the global economy US$2.6 trillion (or 5% of global GDP) annually, and the claim that each year 10-25% of government procurement spending is lost to corruption. How reliable are these quantitative estimates? This is a topic we’ve discussed on the blog before: A few years back I did a couple of posts suggesting some skepticism about the US$1 trillion and US$2.6 trillion numbers (see here, here, here, and here), which were followed by some even sharper criticisms from senior GAB contributor Rick Messick and guest poster Maya Forstater.

This past year, thanks to the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, I had the opportunity to take a deeper dive into this issue in collaboration with Cecilie Wathne (formerly a U4 Senior Advisor, now a Project Leader at Norway’s Institute for Marine Research). The result of our work is a U4 Issue published last month, entitled “The Credibility of Corruption Statistics: A Critical Review of Ten Global Estimates.” (A direct link to the PDF version of the paper is here.)

In the paper, Cecilie and I identified and reviewed ten widely-cited quantitative estimates concerning corruption (including the three noted above), tried to trace these figures back to their original source, and assess their credibility and reliability. While the report provides a detailed discussion of what we found regarding the origins of each estimate, we also classified each of the ten into one of three categories: credible, problematic, and unfounded.

Alas, we could not rate any of these ten widely-cited statistics as credible (and only two came close). Six of the ten are problematic (sometimes seriously so), and the other four are, so far as we can tell, entirely unfounded. Interested readers can refer to the full report, but just to provide a bit more information about the statistics we investigated and what we found, let me reproduce here the summary table from the paper, and also try to summarize our principal suggestions for improving the use of quantitative evidence in discussions of global corruption: Continue reading →

New Podcast, Featuring Sarah Steingrüber

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Sarah Steingrüber, an independent consultant on corruption and public health issues. Among her other activities in this area, she currently serves as the global health lead for the CurbingCorruption web platform, and was the co-author of the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre’s report on Corruption in the Time of COVID-19: A Double-Threat for Low Income Countries. Much of our conversation naturally focuses on how corruption and related issues may intersect with the coronavirus pandemic and its response, in particular (1) misappropriation of relief spending, and (2) how some corrupt leaders may use the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext to eliminate checks and oversight. A central tension we discuss is how the urgency of emergency situations affects the sorts of measures that are appropriate, and draws on lessons from prior health crises such as the Ebola outbreak in West African in 2013-2016. We then discuss other more general issues related to corruption and health, such as how the monetization and privatization of health may contribute to undue private influence on decision-making processes in the health sector.

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.

More Commentaries on Corruption and the Coronavirus Pandemic

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, folks in the anticorruption community have started to generate a fair amount of commentary on the links between the coronavirus pandemic and corruption/anticorruption; these pieces approach the connection from various angles, including how corruption might have contributed to the outbreak and deficiencies in the response, the importance of ensuring adequate anticorruption safeguards in the various emergency measures being implemented to address both the public health crisis and the associated economic crisis, and concerns about the longer term impact on institutional integrity and checks and balances. Last week I posted links to four such commentaries. Since then, we’ve had two commentaries on the corruption-coronavirus relationship here on GAB (yesterday’s post from Sarah Steingrüber, and last week’s post from Shruti Shah and Alex Amico). Since then, I’ve come across some more, and I thought it would be useful to provide those additional links, and perhaps to try to start collecting in one place a list of commentaries on corruption and coronavirus. The new sources I’ve come across are as follows:

In case it’s helpful to readers, I may start to compile and regularly update a list of corruption-coronavirus resources. The ones I’ve got so far (including those noted above):

I’m sure there are more useful commentaries, and many more to come over the coming weeks. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep a comprehensive list, but I’ll do my best to provide links to the resources I’m aware of, so if you know of useful pieces on the corruption-coronavirus link, please send me a note.

Thanks everyone, and stay safe.

U4 Brief on “An International Anti-Corruption Court? A Synopsis of the Debate”

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As regular readers likely know, GAB has featured a number of commentaries over the past few years on the proposal to create an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC), modeled on the International Criminal Court, to try senior figures for grand corruption when their domestic justice systems prove unwilling or unable to do so (see here, here, here, here, and here). The idea has attracted a great deal of interest, as well as both support and criticism. To provide a basic overview of the debate so far, a few months ago the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Center Centre’s Sofie Schütte and I published a short U4 paper entitled “An International Anticorruption Court? A Synopsis of the Debate.”(The brief is also available in French and Spanish.)  For those out there who are new to this topic, this U4 Brief is meant to provide some general background information and a succinct summary of (1) the strongest arguments in favor of creating an IACC, (2) the strongest criticisms of the IACC proposal, and (3) an overview of some other approaches to the grand corruption and impunity problems. Hope it’s helpful!

Guest Post: The Importance of Integrating Anticorruption into Military Capacity-Building Programs

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Today’s guest post is from Associate Professor Åse Gilje Østensen of the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy, and Sheelagh Brady, Senior Analyst at SAR Consultancy:

In developing countries faced with security challenges—such as armed conflict, insurgencies, or widespread violence—foreign donors often offer capacity-building programs to strengthen local security institutions. However, many of these capacity-building programs do not consider corruption or incorporate anticorruption measures within their design. And when donors do consider corruption in military capacity-building programs, they typically focus narrowly, and short-sightedly, on safeguarding program funding, with little apparent concern beyond that. The view seems to be that one can build military or police capacity first, and then (perhaps) deal with corruption later, or even leave anticorruption efforts entirely to organizations and agencies dedicated to this purpose.

This approach is likely mistaken. As documented in a recent case study from the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, Capacity Building for the Nigerian Navy: Eyes Wide Shut on Corruption?, capacity-building efforts in weak states with pervasive corruption can stimulate corrupt or even criminal activity, which may result in more of the insecurity that these efforts are supposed to reduce. As the U4 report notes, “capacity building can strengthen the abilities of corrupt actors to devise corrupt schemes, as the skills and equipment provided may be used to ‘professionalise’ corrupt practices.” Donors and policymakers therefore need to see corruption as a critical concern at the top level of foreign and security policy across countries, and make anticorruption a key component of the design, implementation, and follow-up of military and police training.

In contrast to more ambitious and comprehensive security sector reform programs, capacity building programs seek to achieve modest improvements in capabilities, usually by providing training, mentoring, and/or equipment. Yet while modesty in terms of goals may be useful, donors may be tempted to think that the limited scope of capacity-building interventions implies limited risk. Yet a host of problems can arise when anticorruption measures are not incorporated into capacity building. Most obviously, when adding particular skill sets or strengthening the operational capacity of corrupt security institutions, security personnel may improve their ability to divert resources from their intended purposes. Worse still, building selected capacity without addressing corruption could mean bolstering the segments of the security apparatus involved in facilitating or carrying out criminal activity. It is hard to know just how big of a problem this is, but there are indications that capacity building very often is provided to corrupt security sectors. For example, several studies have found the Nigerian Navy to be heavily involved in facilitating illegal bunkering, oil theft at sea, and piracy in the Gulf of Guinea (see here, here, here, and here). At the same time, the Navy is a partner to two capacity building programs sponsored by the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM): the Africa Maritime Law Enforcement Partnership (AMLEP) and the Africa Partnership Station (APS). Neither of these programs implements measures to prevent corrupt actors in the Navy from using their newfound skills and better technology to fuel insecurity and crime. More generally, according to the Security Assistance Monitor, in 2016 alone the United States provided over $8 billion in arms and training to 50 of the 63 countries that Transparency International (TI) has rated as a having a high or critical risk of corruption in their defense sectors.

How can anticorruption efforts be made part of capacity-building programs? The first step is to recognize that corruption can undermine the results of security assistance programs, and to avoid compartmentalizing “security” and “corruption” as two unrelated issues. After recognizing this fundamental point, one can design and implement sensible anticorruption measures, tailored to the particular circumstances, in particular the informal power distributions and incentive structures that determine who gains from corruption and how. And before implementing capacity building programs in the first place, donors should carefully consider whether those programs will translate into institutional improvements or will instead create “capital” that may be attractive to corrupt actors, subversive forces, or disloyal individuals.

Specialized Anticorruption Courts: An Overview

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I’m going to take a quick break from agonizing about the impending Trumpocalypse to share some news about a new U4 Issue Paper, which I coauthored with Sofie Schütte, on specialized anticorruption courts in countries around the world. (This paper builds on an earlier series of case studies.) Here’s the abstract:

Frustration with the capacity of the ordinary machinery of justice to deal adequately with corruption has prompted many countries to develop specialised anti-corruption institutions. While anti-corruption agencies with investigative and/or prosecutorial powers have attracted more attention, judicial specialisation is an increasingly common feature of national anti-corruption reform strategies. The most common argument for the creation of special anti-corruption courts is the need for greater efficiency in resolving corruption cases promptly and the associated need to signal to various domestic and international audiences that the country takes the fight against corruption seriously. In some countries, concerns about the ability of the ordinary courts to handle corruption cases impartially, and without being corrupted themselves, have also played an important role in the decision to create special anti-corruption courts. Existing specialised anti-corruption courts differ along a number of dimensions, including their size, their place in the judicial hierarchy, mechanisms for selection and removal of judges, the substantive scope of the courts’ jurisdiction, trial and appellate procedures, and their relationship with anti-corruption prosecutors. These institutional design choices imply a number of difficult trade-offs: while there are no definitive “best practices” for specialised anti-corruption courts, existing models and experience may provide some guidance to reformers considering similar institutions. They must decide whether such a court should adopt procedures that are substantially different from those of other criminal courts, and/or special provisions for the selection, removal, or working conditions of the anti-corruption court judges.