Why Monitoring of the UN Convention Against Corruption Matters
The UN Convention Against Corruption should include oversight by ordinary citizens. If not, it risks entrenching a situation where corrupt regimes are merely given a slap on the wrist behind closed doors and told not to loot again.
Shahnaaz Parker, Programme Assistant, Corruption
and Governance Division, and Hennie van Vuuren, Director ISS Cape Town Office
The almost ten-year-old United Nations Convention Against Corruption
(UNCAC) has committed governments to a bold agenda in the fight against
corruption. The current phase of monitoring the implementation of UNCAC through
a peer Implementation Review Group (IRG) is the crucial next step in ensuring
that legal promises move beyond words to real sustained action.
The first UNCAC review cycle is currently underway and South Africa
is among the group of countries currently under review. Senegal and Mali form
part of the IRG that will evaluate the progress South Africa has made with
regard to chapter three (criminalisation and law enforcement) and chapter four
(international cooperation) of the convention. This is an important initiative
when considering the growing concern over corruption among the country’s
citizenry. The most recent Afrobarometer Survey (Round 5, 2012) found that 40% of South Africans thought members
of Parliament and councillors were corrupt. This is up from 25% four years ago
(Afrobarometer Round 4, 2008).
The third IRG meeting took place in mid-June in Vienna, with a
special consultation on the sidelines of the meeting with civil society
organisations. The IRG meeting is an
important opportunity to engage states parties on the progress of the review
mechanism. Through this the IRG fulfils its commitment to the UNCAC
implementation process in identifying the challenges as well as best practices
presented.
A sticking point remains the fact that, outside of government
delegations, ordinary citizens do not have an opportunity to review the report.
This is despite the fact that while Article 63 of UNCAC requires engagement
with civil society, it does not make provision for the mandatory publication
and disclosure of the government self-assessment or the participation of civil
society in the country visit. These limitations in upholding the values of
transparency, impartiality and inclusiveness during the implementation process have
the potential of undermining this process. Imagine what little confidence
Africans would have had in the African Peer Review Mechanism process if only a
small band of officials and politicians had access to the reports? Continued
non-disclosure by governments make comparative studies very difficult, hinder
the progress of anti-corruption efforts, and deeply undermine the notion that
for anti-corruption efforts to be effective they must include oversight by
ordinary citizens. The status quo risks entrenching a situation where corrupt
regimes (including governments using tax havens in Europe and elsewhere) are
merely given a slap on the wrist behind closed doors and told not to loot
again.
South Africa is not unique in the manner in which corruption
challenges democracy and development. Corrupt activities such as tender
irregularities, misappropriation of public funds and unchecked conflicts of
interests should be sufficient motivation for all sectors of society to desire
the open monitoring of anti-corruption efforts. This
includes an assessment of the current legislation in place to facilitate compliance
with UNCAC and, more importantly, the implementation of this legislation
through the application of the rule of law. The ISS has undertaken a parallel
review of implementation in South Africa and it is evident that major
challenges remain in reporting, record keeping and having central databases for
corruption cases, all of which can aid the monitoring process. For the purposes
of the review mechanism, prosecution records are imperative. However, these are
by no means easily available and even the records accessed through Public
Access to Information requests are so vague as to make them of little value to
those monitoring the law. Of the information placed in the public domain by the
National Prosecuting Authority it is clear that successful corruption prosecutions
are proving difficult. During the 2010/2011 period there were 392 reported
incidences of corruption of which 183 were prosecuted, with only 9 convictions.
Corruption-related offences are not easy to prosecute. They involve many hours
of investigative work, coupled with financial expertise and specialised courts
that are not always well run or have insufficient capacity.
All of this makes public oversight extremely important as a means of
ensuring accountability and as a better record of prosecutions. Information
such as corruption statistics need to be easily accessible, disaggregated more
accurately and categorised for ease of understanding. Access to information
will allow citizens to better understand the types of corruption prevalent in
society and what the State is doing to counter this. Importantly, it provides a
bridge to public debate and engagement.
This can be attributed to the growing appreciation for the ‘public
value’ citizens place on services they receive and the perceived achievements
of government programmes. When measuring public value it is vital that these
aspects are considered. Firstly, the performance of government departments
tasked with service delivery is likely
to correlate with the ability of law enforcement structures to improve the rate
of prosecutions and convictions. Secondly, maintaining the trust of the
citizenry is important in establishing State legitimacy, as government has made
a commitment to uphold the values of accountability in its anti-corruption
efforts. Lastly, public value needs to be maintained through greater engagement
with all sectors of civil society, business and government if the
implementation of this convention is to be successful. The multi-stakeholder
National Anti-Corruption Forum and the multi-lateral Open Government
Partnership (of which South Africa is a founding member) are platforms that
could be used for such engagement.
At the recent IRG meeting in Vienna, Dr Iftekhar Zaman (Head of the Civil Society Delegation and
Executive Director of Transparency International Bangladesh) in his address to
the IRG suggested that by improving on time, trust and transparency the impact
of this convention could be far greater.
Timeous reporting on the self-assessment from government and civil
society as well as greater trust between these two sectors should be
established. The input of civil society should also be incorporated into the
review process. Thus, in order for civil society and ordinary citizens to
monitor the UNCAC review process, governments must be urged to publicly share
their self-assessment reports in abiding by the principles of inclusiveness and
transparency. Without this the UNCAC monitoring process risks becoming a ‘members
only’ club. Surely this is what those committed to the fight against corruption
should seek to challenge?
