* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The sincerity of a country's anti-graft efforts can't be measured by its laws and mechanisms
Articles 8.5 and 20 of the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) stipulate that as a means of fighting corruption, governments should establish mechanisms to ensure that public officials declare their assets and provide an explanation when assets don’t correspond to official incomes.
Many countries have put relevant laws on the books, either after signing on to UNCAC or long before it was even conceived. Much of what’s being said and written on asset disclosure deals with the technical side of the question – what are the downsides to disclosure, what information should be disclosed and how frequently, what types of officials should be covered by the law, and what information should be available to the public.
Yet, as such provisions are brought into action, it seems the real challenge is not simply ensuring asset disclosure – it is taking concrete action when disclosure yields some interesting results or raises legitimate questions. Without consistent and non-political follow-through, asset disclosure mandates can become just another one in a string of anti-corruption efforts undertaken by governments without much real impact and viewed with cynicism by the general public.
Take Russia, where in 2010, the speaker of the Russian Parliament omitted information about his wife’s income and assets on his disclosure form. Despite press coverage, in 2011 he once again failed to include that same information in his declaration. This, along with other examples of how Russian parliamentarians don’t fully comply with income declaration provisions (including not publishing them at all), prompted Transparency International-Russia to reach out to relevant government institutions to take action.
What they uncovered is quite interesting – mainly that there is no official body within the Russian government that has the authority and responsibility to review parliamentarians’ income declarations and take appropriate action. Although the Russian parliament vowed in 2010 to create special commissions to review their own asset disclosure forms after the initial set of complaints by civil society, those commissions were never created.
The implicit message within the government is simple: you can publish what you want, or not publish it at all. More worrisome is the message to the general public, which certainly has the right to question the seriousness of the government’s national anti-corruption drive if even such a seemingly simple issue – ensuring proper asset disclosure by members of parliament – can’t be resolved.
And they do. A recent national survey revealed that 52% of Russians thought that corruption among top echelons of government has increased since the 1990s. In 2007, only 16% thought so. This is quite a change in public attitudes in just a few years signaling either a greater awareness of corruption, a growing magnitude of the problem, increasing cynicism, or a combination of all three.
Certainly, on the technical side, it is not hard to put a fix into place – there are plenty of countries that have established agencies to review and verify information disclosure by public officials and take the necessary action when suspicions of corruption arise.
The real question is whether a real commitment to fight corruption at all levels of government exists? As such, there can be no exceptions to the rule and the parliament itself can’t expect others to be transparent if its own members don’t set a high standard. And if that commitment is not there - establishing relevant commissions and agencies will provide little in actually reducing corruption. They’ll just become another loophole to jump through and do business as usual.
