Organization of economic cooperation and development
On 18 July, the directorate for public governance and territorial development (GOV) of the OECD published the 2017 edition of « Government at a Glance ». This annual publication constitutes a dashboard of indicators and performance data in the public sectors of member and partner countries of the OECD, allowing to draw international comparisons. The 2017 edition tackles public spending, employment and payments in the public sector, gender equality, institutions, their performance indicators and degree of openness to citizens, budgeting practices and processes and integrity in the public sector. In this field, the publication highlights that the vast majority of countries adopted tools to monitor integrity in the public sector, but the coherence of the national integrity system often has to be strengthened, as they do not focus enough on risk analyses and expected public policy outcomes.
Council of Europe
On 5 July, the Group of states against corruption (GRECO), entity of the Council of Europe, published a report on transparency of political parties funding in Sweden. Six out of the ten recommendations of the GRECO made in 2009 have been fully implemented and four only partially. The report notably welcomed the adoption of a new legislation in this field in 2014; nonetheless, the reports of political parties remain limited to revenues and do not include expenses, assets and liabilities of parties.
On 6 July, the GRECO published a compliance report for Germany, which was adopted in March 2017, in the framework of the fourth evaluation round on prevention of corruption for members of the Parliament, prosecutors and judges. The conclusions were that Germany implemented in a satisfying way three out of eight recommendations formulated by the GRECO. Even if ethics handbooks were drafted for prosecutors and judges, the recommendations for members of the Parliament faced a degree of resistance. Yet, the GRECO believes that Germany should adopt measures aiming at better regulating conflicts of interests and rules of conduct for members of the Parliament.
European Union
- EU Ombudsman
On 17 July, the European ombudsman asked the European Commission to answer nine questions to understand how the ad hoc ethics committee regulates post-public employment for members of the Commission. If she welcomes President Juncker’s will to strengthen the code of ethics applicable to commissioners, she wants to know if it is sufficient to enforce the obligations on commissioners during and after the end of their functions and to ensure transparency of the opinions adopted by the Ethics committee.
Civil society
On 17 July, Transparency International published an article during the United Nations’ High Level Political Forum on sustainable development. This forum, which took place from 10 to 19 July, was the occasion to exchange about progress and reforms in the different countries on the 17 sustainable development goals to reach by 2030. Goal number 16 includes involvement to fight corruption and increase transparency in the public sector. This objective will not be subject to review before 2019, but Transparency International stresses the importance of monitoring this goal, corruption being one of the main impediments to sustainable development.