“Our member states should not wait for the next big scandal to make reforms”, warned Marin Mrčela, chairman of the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), who presented his 2019 report on Wednesday 3 June.
According to Mr Mrčela, a proactive implementation of the GRECO recommendations is essential, and this requires the political will to prevent corruption and a further loss of trust among citizens.
The Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Marija Pejčinović Burić, echoed this message. “Corruption undermines citizens’ confidence in democracy”, and the authorities must make the implementation of GRECO’s recommendations “a priority at all times”, she said. States made progress in 2019, but they need to “step up their efforts”, she also noted.
Indeed, compliance with the GRECO recommendations as part of its fourth evaluation cycle (relating to parliamentarians, judges and prosecutors) slightly increased slightly last year. By December 2019, 36% of the recommendations had been fully implemented, with the lowest level of compliance for parliamentarians (27%) and the highest score for recommendations relating to judges (37%) and prosecutors (46%).
Marin Mrčela also stressed the new emergency assessment procedure (Article 34). Introduced in 2017 to respond to troubling developments without waiting for the recommendations’ monitoring deadline, this procedure has been activated twice - for Poland in 2018 and for Romania in 2019 - each time with concrete results.
The European Union became a GRECO observer in July 2019.
Read the report: https://bit.ly/2AD7moZ (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)