Impunity and corruption: Going hand in hand!

UNFORTUNATELY, that’s the truth. Powerful perpetrators involved in corruption can too often stymie enforcement against them by interfering with the justice system. Furthermore, investigations are complex, take “ages,” and are expensive. Unfortunately, this country is No. 1 in the world when it comes to impunity. In corruption, the Philippines is Number? You tell me your estimate.

To tackle this “impunity problem,” members of the international anticorruption community are thinking about reforms to international justice institutions. We must think about local reforms to the local justice system also. I don’t see any proposals; everybody is complaining about the severe backlogs in cases in all courts only.

The proposal for a stand-alone court deserves careful study.

…but do we understand the problem?

As a first step in that discussion, it would be important to analyze and discuss the problem of corruption and its precise manifestations and challenges. This means first analyzing the type of criminal activity, the negative impact, and the reason for impunity.

Transparency International has been working with a group of experts to develop a new legal definition of grand corruption: “a definition that captures the problem we are trying to deal with when discussing new infrastructure. We define grand corruption as having three main features:

• a corruption scheme;

• involvement of a high-level public official; and

• serious harm caused, which may take the form of large-scale misappropriation of public resources or gross violations of human rights.” I am missing the need to involve private sector officials who are involved in corruption to be included in the issue also.

This kind of definition could be used to trigger the jurisdiction of an international anti-corruption court or another specialized body or mechanism.

Another option that I would prefer—would be to introduce the specialized body at the national level, in association with special procedural measures relating to jurisdiction, statutes of limitation, immunities, sanctions, standing for victims and the like. If this were to be supported by the Philippine government and both Houses of Congress, the two main issues could be addressed:

Corruption and impunity could be fought. It is good to hear that policymakers should institutionalize public participation in government supply deals to deter corruption. The Integrity Initiative has pushed this for years and succeeded in convincing quite a number of local governments to accept NGO participation in the procurement process. As mentioned above, we should not only focus on government officials involved in corruption, private sector officials are often drivers in the corruption environment also.

The options need to be evaluated, and possible combinations of options, according to a range of criteria, including political feasibility, effectiveness and cost—criteria that are to some extent interconnected. One benefit of the proposal for an international anticorruption court is to draw attention to key questions and help catalyze muchneeded discussions.

Let’s also be clear that corruption has devastating impacts on people worldwide, blocking achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, which the Philippines is committed to.