Corruption Archives - Democracy Digest

Can Peru’s democracy survive corruption?

The struggle against corruption requires strong institutions and leadership — both lacking in Peru, notes Sonia Goldenberg, a former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Many of the decision makers with the power to reform the system have been accused of wrongdoing, she writes for The New York Times:

Key players in the public and private sector also benefit from a corrupt system. They are the most interested in maintaining the status quo. Are they going to carry out the much-needed electoral and political reform that can end up putting them at risk of going to jail? …The one card [the new president Martín] Vizcarra still holds is the widespread disillusionment with Peru’s Congress. If he can mobilize public opinion to support a new anticorruption campaign, he may force lawmakers to go along with it for fear of being exposed.

Vizcarra is the accidental president, but the fact that he never aspired to this job may prove to be his strongest political weapon, adds Goldenberg, a journalist who directed the documentary “Eye Spy” [above], an exposé on Peruvian corruption videotapes.

RTWT

Ukraine’s citizens optimistic, but concerned over corruption

Ukraine’s citizens are showing more economic optimism, but remain concerned over corruption, according to a nationwide poll by the International Republican Institute’s (IRI) Center for Insights in Survey Research:

Twenty-three out of 24 cities believe that the economic situation in Ukraine has improved over the past 12 months. Additionally, in all 24 cities surveyed, citizens reported improvements in the economic situation of their households.

Whereas a clear majority of citizens feel that Ukraine as a country is headed in the wrong direction, rates of satisfaction with local government are far higher. For example, in the city of Vinnytsia, 65 percent of respondents say that their city is headed in the right direction, while 57 percent believe that Ukraine is going in the wrong direction.

“As the fourth ‘megapoll’ in our series, this data demonstrates a clear trend of optimism in Ukraine’s cities, both on the economic front and within the cities themselves,” said IRI Regional Director Stephen Nix. “This demonstrates that commitment to reforms such as decentralization are having a positive impact on the country, and represent an important development in Ukraine’s democratic journey.”

The survey was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

Olympics confirms democracy’s dominance

The graph [above], a follow up to my recent “Dictatorships and the Winter Olympics” post, plots out Freedom House’s aggregate freedom score and Transparency International’s corruption perception index for each country competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics, notes AEI analyst Clay R. Fuller. The number of athletes qualified for competition is represented by the circle around each country. The resulting picture speaks for itself. Democracy is great, he writes:

So, if you live in a democracy, your team is likely much better represented in the Olympics than that of your non-democratic counterparts. You also likely earn thousands of dollars more, have greater personal freedom, and suffer from less corruption. Perhaps most importantly, you also likely live more than six years longer.

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What’s ahead for Ukraine’s reform movement?

Can Ukraine win its war on corruption? ask Melinda Haring [Editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert and a former Penn Kemble fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy] and Maxim Eristavi, co-founder of Hromadske International, a Kiev-based independent news outlet:

“We are sliding back,” the Ukrainian journalist turned parliamentarian Serhiy Leshchenko [a former NED Reagan-Fascell fellow, left] warned a year ago about the arc of political reform in his country. At the time, his assessment sounded alarmist, but it rings true today. Since the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, reformers in and out of Ukraine’s government have tried to remake a fiscally troubled and deeply corrupt country into a Western-oriented, rules-based one, but have only partially succeeded.

“Ukraine’s future as an independent and sovereign state will depend as much on winning its internal war on corruption and fixing its broken government as on keeping Russia contained in the east,” Haring and Eristavi suggest in Foreign Affairs. “If Kiev emerges as a reformist success story, its example will send shock waves through the post-Soviet space and signal that the Kremlin’s neoimperial and rule-breaking project of maintaining control over its former colonial satellites is not sustainable. If it fails, however, the EU-border state may collapse, creating a major security threat for Europe and beyond.”

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EU moves to counter autocrats’ influence in the Balkans

RFE/RL

The European Union sought on Tuesday to reinvigorate the membership ambitions of six Balkan states and reclaim the region as its own amid growing Russian and Chinese influence, setting 2025 as a goal for Serbia and Montenegro to join, Reuters reports:

EU officials now insist there is no alternative but for Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia [a possible democratic success story?], Montenegro and Serbia to join the European Union. Their inclusion in the EU is being held up as an EU ideal that is long overdue since the end of the Cold War and the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn told Reuters last month it was “time to finish the work of 1989.”

But [the EU] makes clear to politicians in all six countries that they will have to get much more serious about establishing the rule of law, cutting out corruption, cracking down on organized crime, settling bilateral disputes and undertaking a range of other democratic changes, POLITICO adds.

“Joining the EU is far more than a technical process. It is a generational choice, based on fundamental values, which each country must embrace more actively, from their foreign and regional policies right down to what children are taught at school,” says the new strategy, obtained by POLITICO ahead of its approval by the Commission on Tuesday.

The prospect of democratic reforms required by the EU accession process will be welcomed by pro-democracy and civil society activists concerned about Russia’s growing influence in the Balkans, which has been associated with an upsurge in illiberal and nationalist sentiment.

Serbian nationalist groups and pro-government media are reportedly targeting Natasa Kandic (right) of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center [and a recipient of the National Endowment for Democracy’s 2000 Democracy Award] after she was nominated for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.by US Congress Helsinki Commission Chairman Senator Roger Wicker and Representative Eliot Engel, ranking member of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

According to the Commission, Kandic founded the Center (Fond za Humanitarno Pravo) in 1992 “to document egregious human rights violations committed during the conflicts associated with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.”

“More than 25 years later, the Humanitarian Law Center continues to fight for justice for victims of war crimes and to battle the extreme nationalism and strained ethnic tensions that linger in the Western Balkans,” the statement said.

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