International Anti-Corruption Day - 2021

                  A little more than one month ago, precisely on 9th December, the whole world celebrated the importance to fight corruption. This year there will be election in October, so let's see what the candidates will promise to help us in this important fight, ask them about it. The public money must be very well used, so that we can have better schools, better hospitals, better security, better streets and roads, better jobs, greater development, less inequality, less injustice. So a better functional government and consequently a better country for all. The fight against corruption is very important,  so we all should be involved in this fight, because the theft of public resources harm us all. But we all should know that this fight is not easy, because activists for this important ethical cause can become a target at some powerful persons, the people should not be naive, there are many people that are not interested in this activism, in this fight.  This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at  https://www.un.org/en/observances/anti-corruption-day. The second was published at   https://www.transparency.org/en/news/international-anti-corruption-day-2021-summit-for-democracy-civil-society

                 Corruption affects all areas of society. Preventing corruption unlocks progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, helps protect our planet, creates jobs, achieves gender equality, and secures wider aceess to essential services such as healthcare and education. While it is everyone's right to benefit from strong anti-corruption efforts, misconduct and wrongdoing is stealing away valuable resources at a time when they are most needed to respond to and recover from the COVID-19 crisis. The 2021 International Anti-Corruption Day seeks to highlight the rights and responsibilities of everyone, Government officials, civil servants, law enforcement officers, mainstream media, the private sector, civil society, academia, in tackling corruption. And yet it is not only countries that need to unite and face this global problem with shared responsibility. Every single person, young and old, has a role to play to prevent and counter corruption, in order to promote resilience and integrity at all levels of society. To achieve this, policies and measures need to be in place for people to be able to speak up and say no to corruption. The U.N. Convention against Corruption emphasizes the responsibility of governments to put in place effective whistle-blower protection to ensure that persons who speak up are protected from retaliation. These measures contribute to effective, accountable and transparent institutions towards a culture of integrity and fairness. Reducing the risk of corruption requires strong anti-corruption bodies, better oversight, more open and transparent public procurement and enhance anti-corruption compliance by the private sector. In addition, countries also need to ensure support and protection for whistleblower and journalists uncovering corruption.                                                                                      We want a world where common good prevails and power is held to account, and that is what we are fighting for. 2021 should have been a landmark year for anti-corruption but, it has fallen short. There have been some significant developments. For example, thanks to our and our allies' determination, the momentum to end the abuse of anonymous shell companies is finally catching on. But the U.N. General Assembly Special Session against Corruption held in June was not exactly we hoped it would be. Governments blatantly ignored civil society's calls to address grand corruption, so much so that they refused to even acknowledge it. Grand corruption is the kind of high-level corruption that results into large-scale theft of public funds and resources. Corruption schemes involving large amounts of money and high-level officials nearly always stretch across borders. Past failures to prevent and confront such cross-border corruption have had a detrimental impact on the health of democracies. The international community recognised that corruption undermines democracy when states adopted the U.N. Convention against Corruption in 2003. Over 15 years have passed, and as the latest Corruption Index showed, most countries around the world have made little to no progress in the fight against corruption. In the worst affected countries, the failure to combat public sector corruption has meant suffering for ordinary people, who continue to be denied basic public services, deprived of economic opportunities and are locked into poverty. In many others, it has been a decade during which policies were skewed in the interests of a powerful few, while accountability mechanisms were weakened or even captured.