More effort needed against corruption
Report says reforms are going in the right direction but more needs to be done to make government open and accountable
REFORMS aimed at more transparency in government do not go far enough, says an anti-corruption watchdog in its annual report.
Transparency International France says “the fight against corruption seems finally to have become a political priority”, however “we’re still only half-way there”.
The organisation notes, among other problems, that many measures enacted under President Hollande remain inactive because decrees need to be passed putting them into application.
It also questions whether bodies charged with monitoring their application have the means to do their jobs properly.
Anti-corruption measures this year included ministers being told to reveal their wealth, and the setting up of a new “High Authority for Transparency in Public Life”, charged with checking on wealth and conflicts of interests of public officials.
Among other issues, the report notes that France still has a mediocre showing in the latest Corruption Perceptions Index, a tool which analyses people’s confidence in the honesty of governments.
The country comes 22nd in the world and 10th in the EU, after countries including the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany. With a score of 71 out of 100 it nonetheless did much better than Italy, 41, or Greece, 35.
The report also notes that in a study Transparency International France did with pollsters BVA in February, 90% of people in France thought corruption in public life was a problem, with political parties seen as the most affected group. Fostering the impression was the regular flow of political scandals in the media (Cahuzac, Woerth-Bettencourt etc).
The report says priorities for the future should include:
• Elected officials should be made to resign if they are found to have conflicts of interests
• Elected officials’ wealth should be made public, as well as gifts, invitations and other perks of MPs
• New rules regulating lobbying put in place for the National Assembly should be extended to other public bodies and diaries of meetings between officials and different interest groups should be made public
• An independent body should be set up to receive and process alerts from the public about corruption
Photo: Bernad
