UN gets new weapon to fight corruption

VIENNA, Wednesday (AFP) The United Nations gains a new weapon in its fight against corruption with the entry into force Wednesday of the first legally binding international agreement against such crime.

"The world will have a powerful new tool to control corruption on a scale that has never existed before," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said in a statement.

The "Convention Against Corruption" adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in October 2003, has been signed by 140 countries after a conference in Merida, Mexico, and ratified by 38.

The notion that "in some societies corruption is OK," is arrogant, Stuart Gilman, the head of the UNODC's anti-corruption unit, told a press conference at UN headquarters in Vienna on International Anti-Corruption Day, December 9. According to UNODC figures, over one trillion dollars (840 billion euros) are paid in bribes every year around the world.

And this corruption has a very human face, Gilman said.

"The face of corruption is the dying grandmother who can't get medication because her family can't bribe the nurse," Gilman said, citing the case of Nigeria under the military dictatorshop of General Sani Abacha, where aid was blocked in the port of Lagos for lack of bribes to take the food further inland where people were starving.

According to the latest Global Corruption Barometer from the non-governmental organization Transparency International, households in countries like Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria, pay up to 20 percent of gross domestic product in bribes every year.

And in Cameroon, Paraguay, Cambodia and Mexico, 31 to 45 percent of households admitted to paying a bribe in the last 12 months, according to the survey.

The new UN convention sets out guidelines on how to prevent and criminalise corruption as well as measures for international cooperation and asset recovery.

"States are required to return money and other assets obtained through corruption to the country from which they were stolen," Costa said in a statement.

"This sends a warning to corrupt officials everywhere that they can no longer expect to enjoy the fruits of their crimes by moving stolen assets abroad," he added.

Officials of international organisations will now be subject to the terms of the convention, which may prevent further embarrassments like the UN's own oil-for-food scandal.

"We need to be seen as an organisation that's lived through (corruption), has survived it, has dealt with it effectively and therefore... we know what we're talking about," Gilman said. But support from Western countries has been limited. Of the 25 European Union members, only France and Hungary have so far ratified the convention.

"That the developed world which so demanded this convention is in fact lagging so far behind the developing world in ratifying it" is "ironic," Gilman said.

Martin Kreutner, the head of the bureau for internal affairs at the Austrian Interior Ministry said Austria would ratify the convention within the next week.

"We will never end corruption," Gilman said, but it can be controlled "so it has little or no impact on democratic institutions and the economy and on the everyday life of our citizens."