By Richard Messick
A critical if little noticed meeting on the fight against corruption took place in Vienna the first week in September (here). The Implementation Review Group of the Conference of States Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, a committee of all 191 parties to the Convention with responsibility for ensuring each party complies with its terms, discussed proposals for strengthening enforcement.
The Convention is the single most important initiative ever taken to curb corruption. Each party pledges not only to make bribery, embezzlement, and other corrupt acts a crime under their domestic law but to actively enforce these laws. Full compliance by all state parties would turn corruption from a pressing national and international priority to a subject of mainly historical interest.
That corruption is not yet the province of historians is because responsibility for ensuring states fully comply with the Convention has been left to their governments. Initially, each government simply reported how well it was meeting its treaty obligations. The review mechanism was later enlarged to include a neighboring state and second from outside the region. The expanded review is a cooperative process with the reviewed government holding a veto over the reviewers’ conclusions.
The reviews produced some progress (here), often thanks to behind the scenes cajoling by the UNODC, which provides technical support to the reviews. It hardly needs saying, however, that leaving it to a government to judge whether it is vigorously combatting corruption means full compliance with UNCAC remains a chimera.
It is for this reason that the UNCAC Coalition, a global network of almost 400 civil society organizations in over 120 countries, has been laser focused on including citizens in the assessment process. Its latest effort: a statement from UN human rights experts it coordinated. Addressed to the Implementation Review Group, the experts urge UNCAC States Parties to protect and expand civic space in national and global anti-corruption fora and strengthen the inclusiveness and transparency of the UNCAC review mechanism.
The signatories, their statement, and additional information on the review mechanism are in this letter by UNCAC Coalition Managing Director Mathias Huter.
Dear colleagues,
A group of UN human rights experts – so-called special procedure mandate holders, including several special rapporteurs – has issued a joint Statement, calling on UNCAC States Parties to protect and expand civic space in national and global anti-corruption fora, and to strengthen the inclusiveness and transparency of the UNCAC’s review mechanism. (Here is a press release by OHCHR.)
We issued an UNCAC Coalition statement today, welcoming the call to action of the UN experts; you can find it here.
This unprecedented Statement of the UN human rights experts comes as States are starting informal negotiations on the future of the UNCAC review mechanism in Vienna this week.
Importantly, the Statement by the UN experts references and echoes our Open Letter, calling for a stronger UNCAC Review Mechanism that a number of people and organizations on the list have endorsed (we reached over 400 endorsements in total!), as well as more detailed recommendations on strengthening the IRM that we have developed. A big thank you to everyone who endorsed the open letter and helped elevate our asks!
The statement is a result of our close engagement with Geneva-based UN human rights fora and OHCHR, as we try to more closely link the UN anti-corruption and the human rights fora.
The UN experts’ statement includes many important references and messages that can also be used for national-level advocacy. Below, I am copying their calls to action:
“(…) Many governments are failing to uphold their commitments under Article 13 of the UNCAC to promote active civil society participation in the fight against corruption. Instead, shrinking civic space and reprisals against anti-corruption activists have become increasingly normalized, both at the national level and within international fora.
In this context, States Parties must take the following immediate steps to uphold civic space and strengthen the integrity and legitimacy of the UNCAC framework:
- i) Adopt reforms to make the UNCAC IRM more effective, transparent, and inclusive in its second phase at the 11th UNCAC CoSP to uphold civic space and enhance global efforts to strengthen anti-corruption and the rule of law. States Parties should take into account and act upon civil society’s detailed recommendations to ensure active civil society participation in key stages of the country review process and follow-up; enhance transparency by publishing all input and output documents, NGO submissions and other information, including a calendar of country reviews that is regularly updated and timelines for the reviews and how stakeholders can engage; and develop an effective, efficient, and inclusive follow-up process to monitor countries’ implementation of recommendations and to assess the effectiveness of UNCAC provisions in practice to prevent and combat corruption. Country reviews should also consider the findings of other relevant anti-corruption and human rights mechanisms, including the Universal Periodic Review.
- ii) Launch formal consultations with civil society organizations to identify practical measures for implementing Article 13 and other relevant provisions of the UNCAC, ensuring that civic engagement becomes a norm rather than an exception in UNCAC processes;
iii) Promote transparency and civil society participation in UNCAC fora by granting NGOs observer status in all UNCAC CoSP subsidiary bodies, facilitating and safeguarding NGO and other civil society actors’ participation in and access to the UNCAC Conference of States Parties, ensuring civil society is involved in follow-up activities to promote the implementation of CoSP resolutions, providing adequate opportunities to raise country-specific concerns, and ensuring adequate access to information in UNCAC fora.
- iv) Establish a global monitoring mechanism to track reprisals against anti-corruption defenders, including a safe platform for reporting, regular analysis of patterns of restrictions, and coordinated responses to ensure the safety and sustainability of civic actors worldwide.
- v) Strengthen the integration of human rights and anti-corruption frameworks, particularly through deeper institutional collaboration between the Human Rights Council and UNCAC bodies, and by inviting relevant Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council to contribute directly to deliberations at the Conference of the States Parties (CoSP) and its subsidiary bodies.
(…) We stand united in urging all States Parties to the UNCAC to recognize civil society not as an obstacle, but as an indispensable partner in combating corruption and promoting human rights. Failure to act risks accelerating the erosion of civic space, weakening anticorruption efforts, and undermining the enjoyment of human rights globally. As negotiations over the second phase of the IRM continue, and with the next UNCAC Conference of the States Parties in Doha on the horizon, States must demonstrate genuine political will through concrete action, not only to uphold the spirit and commitments of the Convention, but to safeguard the enjoyment of human rights.”
The experts:
Gina Romero, Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association;
George Katrougalos, Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order;
Marcos A. Orellana, Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes;
Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the right to education;
Laura Nyirinkindi (Chair), Claudia Flores (Vice-Chair), Dorothy Estrada Tanck, Ivana Krstić, and Haina Lu, Working Group on discrimination against women and girls;
Cecilia M. Bailliet, Independent Expert on human rights and international solidarity;
Mary Lawlor, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders;
Surya Deva, Special Rapporteur on the right to development
