Anti-graft battle making no progress
berlin — Governments are not doing enough in the global fight against graft, anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) said on Wednesday as it presented its annual corruption perceptions index.
Many nations have made no progress at all over the past six years, the group found.
“More corruption correlates with less respect for civil liberties, for rule of law, for access to justice,” TI chair Delia Ferreira Rubio said.
“The index reflects the relation between transparency and democracy.” Over the past six years, some countries such as Senegal, Ivory Coast and Britain have bolstered efforts to battle corruption, TI found.
Others have slipped lower in the NGO’s worldwide ranking, including Syria or Yemen.
“Countries where rule of law is respected, freedom of expression is respected, freedom of the Press is respected” topped in the rankings, Ferreira Rubio said.
TI said its 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index “reveals some disturbing information”.
“Despite attempts to combat corruption around the world, the majority of countries are moving too slowly in their efforts,” the Berlin-based organisation said. “While stemming the tide against corruption takes time, in the last six years many countries have still made little to no progress.”
Transparency ranks 180 countries and territories by perceived levels of public sector corruption where zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. It relies upon 13 expert data sources, including assessments from the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the World Economic Forum, to determine levels of bribery, diversion of public funds, use of public office for private gain and other issues of corruption.
The best performing region was Western Europe with an average score of 66, while the worst performing region was sub-Saharan Africa with an average of 32, followed closely by Eastern Europe and Central Asia with an average of 34. The global average was 43. — AFP, AP