Tag Archives: UNCAC Coalition

UN Human Rights Council: Reducing Corruption, Promoting Human Rights Inextricably Linked

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On July 7 the U.N. Human Rights Council approved without dissent a resolution stressing the close link between the advancement of human rights and the fight against corruption. It unequivocally and without qualification proclaims what advocates of each have long recognized:

“the promotion and protection of human rights and the prevention of and fight against corruption are mutually reinforcing;”

U.N. Human Rights Council REsolution 59/6

Importantly, the resolution spells out how corruption fighters and human rights advocates can work together to achieve the two objectives. And to further this cooperation, it mandates:

  • A comprehensive, new study by the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee to develop concrete guidelines for implementing States’ procedural and substantive human rights obligations in the context of preventing and combating corruption, with broad consultation of stakeholders, including civil society.
  • The encouragement for Human Rights Council mechanisms to consider corruption’s impact within their existing mandates.
  • Stronger policy coherence across United Nations processes in Geneva, Vienna, and New York on corruption and its human rights implications.

The resolution’s passage is the latest effort by the UNCAC Coalition, a global network of almost 400 civil society organizations in over 120 countries, to foster ties between those working to advance human rights and those fighting corruption. Its other work towards this end includes:

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Signatures Sought on Call for More Participatory UNCAC Review Mechanism

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Lincoln famously remarked that laws without enforcement are just good advice, an observation anticorruption advocates understand all too well.

For almost two decades, the UNCAC Coalition has sought to see that the world’s most important anticorruption law, the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, is something more than just good advice. Its latest effort: Gathering signatures from NGOs, individuals and other entities (companies, professional associations etc.) on an open letter to the 191 UNCAC States Parties calling for a more effective, transparent and inclusive mechanism for reviewing compliance with the Convention.

The letter is open for endorsement until 2 June. To date there are more than 230 signatories from 90+ countries.

The letter is available here in English, Spanish, French, Russian and Arabic, the list of current signatories here, the sign-up form for endorsements here.

UNCAC Coalition Seeks Input on Improvements to UNCAC Implementation Review Mechanism

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GAB just learned of the UNCAC Coalition’s request for comments on a paper recommending ways to strengthen review of state’s compliance with the provisions of the UN Convention Against Corruption. Though the timeline is tight (August 8) and it’s the height of vacation season for Northern Hemisphere readers, please take a moment to examine the paper and offer thoughts. This is an important initiative by one of the NGOs leading the fight to combat corruption in all nations.

The UNCAC Coalition is launching a campaign calling for States to make the UNCAC review mechanism #FitForPurpose. The aim is for the next UNCAC Conference of the States Parties (CoSP) in 2025 to agree on a stronger review mechanism for the next review phase. We want to make sure that our campaign reflects the experiences and views of our global anti-corruption community.

The Coalition’s proposals to strengthen and improve the IRM are described in this Google Doc – please provide your input and thoughts by 8 August, by adding comments there (including your name and organization).

We are seeking your feedback on 

  1. whether there are elements that are missing or could be better formulated, 
  2. whether you agree with the proposed measures, and
  3. which elements should be prioritized.

We will use your input and feedback to refine the priorities of our advocacy over the next one and a half years as States discuss and negotiate what the next phase of the UNCAC IRM will look like. 

There is wide agreement that the UNCAC review mechanism in its current phase has numerous weaknesses that make it ineffective in holding States to account for their anti-corruption commitments, including a lack of transparency and inclusiveness, a lengthy and inefficient review process and no structured follow-up process.

Guest Post: Forcing States to Grant Corruption Victims Legal Standing

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Today’s guest post is by Carlos G. Guerrero Orozco, a Mexican litigation lawyer and partner at López Melih y Estrada Abogados. He chairs the non-profit Derechos Humanos y Litigio Estratégico Mexicano and heads the International Database Taskforce at the Working Group on Victims of Corruption of the UNCAC Coalition.

Corruption is what social scientists call a “wicked problem,” one extraordinarily difficult to solve because of its complex and interconnected nature. Governments thus need all the help they can muster to tackle it. But too many sideline a critical ally, those harmed by corruption.

Corruption’s victims are many and their injuries diverse. Journalists threatened, and too frequently murdered, for revealing corrupt schemes. Whistleblowers attacked for denouncing corruption. Citizens injured or killed when corruptly constructed buildings collapse; those denied access to education, health care, and fair courts thanks to bribery, embezzlement, and other corruption crimes.

All are victims and all have real claims for damages and strong incentives for joining with governments to fight corruption.

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Civil Society to the CoSP: Corruption Victims Are Entitled to Compensation

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The Council of State Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, the governments of the now 188 nations that have ratified the Convention, meets this week to review its implementation.  

When it comes to prosecuting bribery, embezzlement, and other corruption crimes, progress has been made. The UN Office of Drugs and Crime reports that “[i]n a considerable number of countries, legislative amendments and structural reforms have produced coherent and largely harmonized criminalization regimes, tangible results in terms of enforcement capabilities and action.”

But the Convention’s “enforcement capabilities and action” extend beyond criminal prosecution.  Article 35 requires state parties to ensure those injured “as a result of an act of corruption” can enforce a claim for damages against the perpetrators.

Here little progress has been made.  The UNODC, Transparency International, academics (here and here), and this writer have all found that few corruption victims have recovered damages. 

The UNCAC Coalition, a global network of over 350 civil society organizations in 100 plus countries, urges the CoSP to address this gap in implementation.  In a formal submission, the coalition offers a series of recommendations to see that victims, either individually or through a class or representative action, can recover full compensation for the harm caused by corruption. It’s timely and important submission is here.

Compensating Victims of Corruption

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That corruption is not a victimless crime is no longer in doubt.  The once fashionable argument that corruption advances human welfare by “greasing the wheels” of clunky bureaucracies has been entombed thanks to a plethora of academic studies, media reports, and first-person accounts showing the undeniable, often enormous, harm corruption wreaks on individuals and society as a whole.  As UN Secretary General António Guterres told this week’s seventh meeting of the parties to the UN Convention Against Corruption, that harm ranges from denying citizens access to such basic rights as “health services, schools and economic opportunities” to undermining the very foundation of the state through enabling “a small elite in positions of power to prosper” thus destroying citizens’ “faith in good governance.”

While the damage corruption does is now clear, how to recompense the losses it causes is anything but.  The definitive legal text, the UN Convention Against Corruption, offers little help.  To be sure, article 35 requires state parties to give those “who have suffered damage as a result of an act of corruption … the right to initiate legal proceedings against those responsible … to obtain compensation and article 57 directs governments that have recovered the proceeds of corrupt acts to give priority to “compensating the victims of the crime.” Nowhere, however, does the convention offers any guidance on how to determine who is a victim of corruption or how their damages should be determined.  As a result, both international and domestic law on victim compensation will have to develop through court decisions, learned commentary, and legislation.

An important step in developing this law is the paper the UNCAC Coalition, a network of some 350 civil society groups from over 100 countries, submitted to this week’s meeting of UNCAC state parties.  “Recovery of Damages and Compensation for Victims of Corruption” draws on international law and emerging law and practice in both developed and developing states to guide the creation of laws governing corruption victim compensation.   The Coalition urges governments to: Continue reading →

Civil Society on Returning Stolen Assets to Highly Corrupt Governments

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The return of the proceeds of corruption to the victim country is a “fundamental principle” of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption.  How that return is to be realized, however, remains subject to dispute, particularly when the victim country’s government is highly corrupt.  Should governments where the stolen assets are discovered send them back no matter how corrupt the victim country’s government is?  Wouldn’t the return to a highly corrupt government frustrate the Convention’s most basic purpose — the prevention of corruption.

How to resolve this tension has been the subject of vigorous debate on this blog (here, here, here, here, here and here).  Now some 50 members of the UNCAC Coalition’s Civil Society Working Group on Accountable Asset Return, from both countries where stolen assets have been found and those where return has been requested or realized, have weighed in.  In a February 14 letter to an UNCAC conference on asset recovery (addis-ababa-conf-agenda-february-2017-updated-02-02-2017), they write that where the victim country’s government is highly corrupt, it should be bypassed: “returning and receiving countries should in consultation with a broad spectrum of relevant experts and non-state actors find alternative means of managing the stolen assets” (emphasis in original).  The letter offers powerful arguments in support of its position.  The full text and the list of signers follows.  Continue reading →

More on the Tension between Analysis and Advocacy for Anticorruption Academics

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A couple weeks back I posted some brief reflections that  alluded to the possibility of the tension,  between academics and advocates. I asserted this tension was something I’d observed, but I didn’t give any specific examples. Partly because of that weakness in the original post, I thought I’d follow up on this topic, using a concrete example of the tension I had in mind.

That example is drawn from a debate I’ve engaged in elsewhere on this blog with Maud Perdriel-Vaissiere, an advisor to the UNCAC Coalition. In brief, the substantive issue that she and I (and others) have been arguing about is the extent to which the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) obligates law enforcement agencies that recover judgments or settlements against bribe-paying firms to share those proceeds with the governments of the countries where the bribes were paid. I won’t go into all the details here. (For those who are interested, some of my earlier posts on the topic can be found here and here, and other contributors to this blog have discussed related issues here, here, here, and here.) In my most recent post on the subject, I specifically criticized Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere’s discussion of the issue in a post she published on the UNCAC Coalition’s blog. Among other criticisms, I accused Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere of failing to make basic distinctions between different types of legal recovery, of failing to acknowledge their different treatment under UNCAC, and of citing misleading statistics that conflated these different forms of recovery. I described the legal analysis in the post as “sloppy” and concluded with some harsh words: “The anticorruption community can and should do better.”

Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere submitted a lengthy, detailed, and thoughtful rebuttal, which you can read in the comments section for the original post. Much of her response focuses on substantive matters where she and I respectfully disagree, and I leave it to interested readers to make their own determinations on those issues. But part of her reply caught my attention because it so nicely illustrates, in a much more concrete form, the “analyst vs. advocate tension” I alluded to generally in my post on the role of academics. Here’s what Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere has to say in my response to my criticism that she cites misleading statistics that don’t take into account the differences between distinct forms of recovery: Continue reading →

UNCAC Does Not Require Sharing of Foreign Bribery Settlement Monies with Host Countries

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Maud Perdriel-Vaissiere, the Advisor on Asset Recovery for the UNCAC Coalition (a global civil society network committed to promoting compliance with the UN Convention Against Corruption) recently published a post on the UNCAC Coaltion blog entitled, “Is there an obligation under the UNCAC to share foreign bribery settlement monies with host countries?” Her answer is yes. Indeed, she says that the contrary position is based on a “gross misreading” of UNCAC, that UNCAC’s asset recovery provisions (in Chapter V) apply even to “stolen or embezzled funds over which foreign governments cannot establish prior ownership” (emphasis hers), and that there is “no doubt [that] there is an obligation under the UNCAC [for supply-side enforcers] to share foreign bribery settlement monies with host countries!” (The exclamation mark is hers as well.)

As readers of this blog may be aware, I think this is wrong, based on a sloppy and tendentious misreading of the language of the treaty. Though I’ve written on this before, I think Ms. Perdriel-Vaissiere’s analysis deserves a rebuttal. Continue reading →