EU accession and member states should publish their UNCAC self-assessment reports!

The six EU accession and member states (Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France, Lithuania and Spain) that are part of the first year of the very first review cycle under the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC, see treaty text here) should follow the good example of those State Parties that have already made their self- assessment reports publicly available.

As a member of the UNCAC Coalition (https://www.uncaccoalition.org/), the TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL Liaison Office to the European Union (TI-EU) is glad to see that so far 3 of the twenty-six State Parties currently under review have gone online and shared their entire self-assessment report with the public. The five EU member states and Croatia as an EU accession state should follow this approach and thus help set the right standards!

In the case of Brazil, the self-assessment has been posted on a government website, which can be found here. Even better, two other parties Rwanda and the United States have agreed to have their self-assessments published on the website of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which is the secretariat to the review process (the list of country pairing of the review cycle year 1 is available here). Whatever way is chosen, most important, in the view of TI-EU, is that the public has access to the information covered in the full reports.

Only with public access to information can civil society participation, as required by the UNCAC, be ensured – an issue that TI is planning to further address with regards to the upcoming Conference of State Parties (CoSP) in Marrakesh/ Morocco in October 2011.

Dr. Janina Berg, Transparency International Liaison Office to the European Union (TI-EU)