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Why does International Anti-Corruption Day receive so little media attention?
By Luke Balleny
Is the world aware that Friday December 9 2011 is International Anti-Corruption day? Probably not.
Corruption affects people everywhere daily. Yet a near total lack of publicity in national papers has left International Anti-Corruption Day with few followers and the occasion makes little headway in raising awareness.
So what is it all about?
The General Assembly of the United Nations designated Dec. 9 as International Anti-Corruption Day on Oct. 31 2003, the same day it also formally adopted the United Nations Convention against Corruption, the only truly global anti-corruption convention.
The stated aim of International Anti-Corruption Day is “to raise awareness of corruption and the role of the convention in combating and preventing it,” according to a statement on the U.N. website. But if no one knows that December 9 is International Anti-Corruption Day, how can the day raise awareness of corruption?
There was one corruption story on Friday that made headlines and it concerned supermarket giant Wal-Mart and how it is carrying out an internal probe into whether some of its employees had violated the U.S. anti-bribery law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
Britain’s Daily Telegraph and Financial Times, the U.S. Wall Street Journal and the Reuters and Bloomberg newswires all carried the story. But not one of them mentioned that December 9 was International Anti-Corruption Day.
However, there is one day of the year that consistently raises awareness of corruption, creating headlines around the world and overshadowing the official International Anti-Corruption Day. The day, which this year fell on Dec. 1, is the launch of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).
As soon as the annual index is launched, corruption is quite literally front page news across the world: From Canada’s Globe and Mail to Indonesia’s Jakarta Post via Lebanon’s Daily Star and Israel’s Jerusalem Post, newspapers love to dissect their country’s ranking and deliberate on the reasons why they may have fallen or risen that year.
To be fair, Transparency International has been publishing its CPI since 1995 so they’ve had an eight-year head-start on the U.N.’s International Anti-Corruption Day.
Dec. 9 underlines the importance of the U.N. Convention against Corruption, a cornerstone in the global battle against graft. But for now, with TI’s CPI stealing the spotlight and the scant global media coverage, the significance of the day is lost on many.
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