Tag Archives: UNCAC article 35

Victims of Corruption Focus of Today’s COSP Events

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Four events at today’s meeting of the Council of State Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption put the damage corruption does to individuals and organizations front and center. The subject and starting hour (U.S. East Coast time) of each:

  • 9:00: Strategic Litigation: Advocacy Tool for Policy Change (details here)
  • 13:00: Victims of Corruption, New York Meeting Room (details here)
  • 16:00: Righting the wrong: Tools for Asset Recovery in Global Corruption Cases, New York Meeting Room
  • 18:00: A Victim-Centered Approach to Anticorruption Actions, Seattle Meeting Room (details here)

Among the highlights will be a review and discussion at Victims of Corruption session of StAR’s just published volume Victims of Corruption: Back for Payback. A heroic effort to bring together the diverse sources and approaches to compensating victims of corruption (to which I was honored to contribute), it represents a major step forward in focusing the attention of UNCAC states parties, jurists, and civil society activists on article 35, UNCAC’s most overlooked provision –

Each State Party shall take such measures as may be necessary, in accordance with principles of its domestic law, to ensure that entities or persons who have suffered damage as a result of an act of corruption have the right to initiate legal proceedings against those responsible for that damage in order to obtain compensation.

Guest Post: Is UNCAC Article 35 a “Dead Letter” in the United States?

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Today’s Guest Post is by Craig R. Arndt, an international lawyer living in Bangkok. In the course of a long career, he advised multinational clients on a range of corruption-related matters and has represented those injured by corruption in actions to recover damages.

The drafters of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption recognized that corruption was a transnational disease. And that accordingly, no country could fight it on its own. Hence, in its very first article the Convention makes it clear that states ratifying it are obliged to “promote, facilitate, and support international cooperation and technical assistance in the prevention of and fight against corruption.”  

Article 35 of the Convention sets forth one of the ways states are required to work together to curb cooperation. It provides that each party must “ensure that entities or persons who have suffered damage as a result of an act of corruption have the right to initiate legal proceedings against those responsible . . . to obtain compensation.”

Rick has documented the sorry state of civil recoveries by bribery victims in transnational cases (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). That state is now even sorrier thanks to two recent decisions by American federal courts of appeal. In the words of one commentator, the two “gut” article 35.

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