In its annual report published on Thursday 3 May, the Group of Countries against Corruption (GRECO) issued a warning against any reversal in the fight against corruption observed in some member states.
Without referring to any specific country, GRECO warned that, “New legislative initiatives in certain European countries in 2017 reversed reforms previously undertaken to strengthen the prevention of corruption or started reforms that may result in breaches of the Council of Europe´s anti-corruption standards”.
“Although there was overall progress in introducing new measures to fight corruption in respect of MPs, judges and prosecutors, their practical implementation remained slower than desirable.”
The report highlights a number of good practices, for example, in Croatia, the prosecutors' ethics committee, a new communication on “corruption cases” in the Netherlands and “efficient anticorruption bodies” in France.
GRECO pays homage to the assassinated Maltese journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, but does not make any reference to failings in this regard in Malta at all.
The report concludes that by 31 December 2017 the states evaluated had not implemented almost one third (30%) of GRECO’s recommendations issued in respect of MPs (asset reporting, restrictions on outside business activities, transparency of interactions with lobbyists and the management of conflicts of interest) and had only partially implemented 44.4% of them.
The level of compliance was higher in respect of judges: almost half of GRECO’s recommendations (42.6%) had been implemented by the states evaluated but one third remained only partly implemented (36%) and close to one out of five, had not been implemented (21%).
These recommendations referred to recruitment, transfer or promotion procedures, as well as to the need for codes of conduct for judges, which one third of the countries evaluated were yet to adopt. The results were good for prosecutors, with 54% of recommendations fully applied and 32% of them partially implemented. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)