Last week President Obama flew to Afghanistan to rally the troops before the upcoming offensive in Kandahar. He also paid a visit to President Karzai. According to the Associated Press, “The trip was intended to let Obama tell Karzai that he must deal with corruption and cut the flow of money from poppy production and […]
Last week, the official drug czar of Guatemala as well as the chief of national police were arrested for allegedly leading a police ring that stole cocaine from drug traffickers. Now that is deep-rooted corruption. Guatemala is caught in a vicious cycle. On one side, the police and security forces have become involved in organized […]
East Timor: The would be assassins of Timornese President José Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão have been given sentences ranging from 16 to 24 years in prison. This would-be junta rebels was mostly composed of disaffected police and military. This blog detailed the events that preceded this trial in more detail, here. Indonesia: Another […]
Italian politics is always colorful, especially so when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is involved. His latest move gives an ironic twist to corruption fighting. Berlusconi has been accused of everything from womanizing to mafia links, but to date he has mostly slithered out between the fingers of the law. One current trial accuses him of […]
Nawaz Sharif present flowers to Justice Khawaja – daylife Saturday February 13 – The Chief Justice of Pakistan defied Presidential orders through a suo moto action against the Presidential notification for appointment of certain judges. Chief Justice, in a rare nightly emergency session, formed a three members bench that suspended two recommendations for judges’ appointment […]
Can corruption really be fought? That is, can you change a society from one whose everyday wheels are greased by bribes to one in which petty corruption is rare and shunned? Can you, say, turn Uzbekistan into Britain? The textbook examples of such change are Singapore and Hong Kong. Both faced corruption as a commonplace […]
In follow-up to my Haiti post, Transparency International has just released a handbook on humanitarian aid. Very interesting and worth checking out.
Campaign finance is one of the gray areas of corruption, a practice that makes those concerned with accountability squirm, but one that is largely legal. Few would claim that democracy is served when a donor’s financing of a political campaign leads directly to policies in favor of that donor – but such a link is […]
The former president of Guatemala, Alfonso Portillo, has been charged with money-laundering in the United States, whose banks he had been using to allegedly embezzle from the Guatemalan government. This is an admirable example of an international effort to fight otherwise domestic corruption.
As millions of dollars in aid and other resources flow to Haiti, it is inevitable that someone will raise the specter of waste through corruption. Often such words come from those who oppose aid on ideological grounds, swaying public opinion by exploiting our natural aversion to corruption. But genuine abuses unfortunately do occur, and their […]
There was a time when a bribe to obtain a driver’s license was corruption, but a bribe to obtain a contract was just business. No longer. Companies around the world are now paying attention not just to the practices of their own employees, but to those of their subsidiaries and partners. And most of the […]
It is the time of year when people promise to do things differently, when they commit to change. What might world leaders resolve for fighting corruption and promoting accountability in 2010? There are few political or business leaders on the planet who would not publicly vouch for anti-corruption and accountability. This is the lingo of […]
Can corruption really be stopped? With all the fuss that is made about anti-corruption programs and holding corrupt leaders to account, this is not a trivial question. There are people who argue that corruption is simply “the way things are done here” or “part of the culture,” implying that change is not possible. In this, […]
The country perhaps most associated with corruption in the U.S. popular press today is Afghanistan. Coverage of corruption in Afghanistan has mushroomed since the August presidential election, which observers found to be riddled with fraud. While it is not necessarily a valid assumption that electoral fraud indicates systemic corruption, in this case the accusation is […]
Last spring, I attended an event about the new positive resource contracts of Liberia, held at Revenue Watch, an international NGO which seeks transparency in the finances of governments with natural resources. During the Q & A, a man got up to congratulate a Liberian official there, and to pray that in his own country, […]