Nathaniel
In the last month, Global Integrity's Nathaniel Heller and I have been traveling in the South Pacific, talking with local experts about the results of the Global Integrity Report: 2007. In Timor-Leste and Vanuatu, we convened government officials, civil society activists, foreign donors and journalists to talk about corruption and governance. This is what we learned. 
Our first stop was Timor-Leste, a country that is very nearly starting from zero in its efforts to create the institutions necessary for democracy. Despite this, and despite the many tragedies of its history, both recent and past, I was left with a sense of cautious optimism for the future of the new nation. I spoke to so many people in Timor-Leste who had a sense of purpose and determination about the work they were doing.
Still, there is so much work to be done. Infrastructure is poor; we planned our workshop by candlelight after the power cut out during a heavy rain. Internally displaced persons (IDP) camps are an inescapable feature of the capital -- muddy, crowded lots of big tents with aid agency logos on them. In a very real way, Timor-Leste is starting over.
To give some context, consider this vignette: the justice system has recently been converted from speaking Tetum (the local dialect) to Portuguese (the language favored by the resistance movement). However, only some 5 percent of the population speaks Portuguese, causing a shortage of qualified lawyers and judges. An informal tally lists the total number of judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys working in the country at under 30 people. There is only one functioning court house outside of the capital of Dili. And of the eight or so prosecutors available to try cases in Timor-Leste, three of them were still living in IDP camps. Not exactly an ideal working environment.
But work goes on. Earlier this month, Global Integrity and AusAID convened a workshop of government officials, advocates, donors and journalists to discuss corruption and governance in Timor-Leste and to plot a course for the future of anti-corruption policy. Global Integrity's role in this discussion is not to provide answers or recommendations. Instead, we bring a process of structured reflection and an evidence-based dialogue that enables local stakeholders to identify areas for improvement and establish their own priorities for reform.
The results of this process are published here:
Timor Leste Workshop conclusions
Pictures from our trip are here.
Photos: (cc) Jonathan Werve
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Talking Corruption in Timor-Leste
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Reporter's Notebook: Vanuatu
By Bob Makin
Vanuatu is a very small country (pop. 200,000), and the capital city is tiny (30,000). Yet bad news travels as fast as the trade wind — which frequently carries with it the smell of corruption.
In 2006, a resident of an area adjacent to the spring supplying water to the capital, Port Vila, noticed that a farmer down below had constructed a dwelling of some permanence. Believing this building to be inside an area protected by law to prevent contamination of the city's drinking water, the resident made further inquiries. Indeed, the farmer had built where no structure was allowed, and where he had permission to farm only crops unlikely to present a hazard to the aquifer.
The observant resident notified the authorities, but he found out that the matter was not all that straightforward...
Read More at the Global Integrity Report...
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Internet Censorship: A Comparative Study
Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a U.S. court's recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn't work very well.
Starting in 2007, Global Integrity added specific questions about Internet censorship to the Integrity Indicators, which are a set of 304 questions addressing the practice of anti-corruption in national governments. We have always held that a free and critical media is an essential component of good governance; adding an analysis of Internet censorship was an overdue refinement.
We asked our local research teams to investigate two questions:
The Many Flavors of Internet Censorship
A few countries, however, are deeply committed to trying to make censorship work. On this list in 2007 are Algeria, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand. Each has it's own flavor to the repression of online speech -- Internet censorship is still in an experimentation phase, and even the most aggressive approaches don't seem to work very well.
- Algeria has no firewalls or filters, but outlaws hosting content critical of the government, and monitors chat rooms for political speech. [source]
- China is home to 1.3 billion people and has a highly scalable technological approach based on extensive content filters known satirically as the Great Firewall of China. China is also uses technology to discourage content creation, deploying cute animated police characters (pictured above) to remind Internet users they are being watched. [source]
- Egypt has limited technical means to discourage content creation, so it relies on an old-fashioned technique -- harassment, beatings and arrests. Hala Al-Masry used to publish in a blog entitled "Cops Without Boundaries" until the government harassed her, "unknown people" beat her father, and she and her husband were arrested and signed a commitment to shut down the blog. Similar techniques have shut down websites of opposition parties. [source]
- Kazakhstan has little Internet capacity. The government uses this to mask censorship -- rather than block sites, it slows them down, frustrating the users of political content into looking elsewhere. The KNB (formerly the KGB) has a special program called Bolat, which slows down, but does not stop, access to sites of terrorist organizations. Popular opinion holds that it is used to slow opposition party sites as well. [source]
- Russia has a mixed bag of state persecution and neglect, allowing a rare opening for free expression in a country with highly restricted media. However, the sophistication of the attacks that do occur is frightening, with hackers singling out individual online targets. For instance, the website of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow radio station critical of the Kremlin, was brought down by a DDoS attack last year. [source]
- Thailand's military junta moved aggressively to shut down message boards and the formerly-ruling party Thai Rak Thai website after taking over the country in 2006. But the junta's censorship cops work to keep the thinnest appearance of tolerance -- message boards were allowed to reopen under the condition that they did not "provoke any misunderstandings." Message received. [source]
The court order that muzzled Wikileaks.org (covered here) was prompted not by the government but by a bank registered in the Cayman Islands. The bank used American courts and a compliant domain registrar to scrub the wikileaks.org URL from the Internet. It is extremely unlikely that this decision will stand up in an appeals court, but the larger point is that there is no reason this case should even be fought. Wikileaks should not need a legal team to explain to the courts that the First Amendment requires freedom of speech.
The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.
Online Censorship: Sounds good, but it never works.
While there is much diversity in the style of Internet censorship among the world's worst offenders, one common thread unites them: Internet censorship doesn't work. Cut off one site, and a thousand more pop up. In China, censorship online is sparking criticism that off-line censorship has rarely seen.
So Wikileaks.org went offline, but Wikileaks mirror sites hosted overseas hold the same content, and the original site is still up and running from Sweden (http://88.80.13.160) without its easier-to-type URL. As it turns out, shutting down Wikileaks-the-website has focused our attention on Wikileaks-the-idea, which is spreading at the speed of light.
UPDATE: for more reading on anti-corruption, governance and censorship, try the Global Integrity Report. For more on online censorship, try the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Open Net Initiative.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Timor Leste: Tears and Uncertainty
The International Herald Tribune has a recap of a traumatic week in Timor Leste, following the shooting of President José Ramos-Horta and death of rebel leader Alfredo Reinado, who was buried today. IHT reports that emergency rule has been extended another ten days. For background on Timor Leste's political history, see our corruption timeline, part of the Global Integrity Report: Timor Leste.
While the Australian-lead security force has increased its commitment to the young nation, the soldiers can only do so much to solve what are fundamentally political problems. It is useful to remember that the rebellion of Reinado and his followers sprung from a dispute over the management of promotions and pay in the military. Armed rebel groups call to mind some fundamental ethnic or sectarian divide, but that is not the case this time. This specific conflict was sparked by failures of institutions.
The IHT reports: On Wednesday, Parliament approved Gusmão's request to extend the 48-hour state of emergency for another 10 days, under which an 8 p.m. curfew is imposed, unauthorized public gatherings are banned and the police are granted special additional powers.
Australia bolstered its 780-strong military deployment with an additional 140 troops and 70 police officers. East Timor's near neighbors, Australia and Indonesia, have justifiable concerns about the stability of the six-year-old nation. Civil war in East Timor following Portugal's abrupt de-colonization in 1975 caused a flood of refugees across the border into Indonesia and gave Indonesia the pretext to begin an invasion and a brutal 24-year occupation.
Hugh White, a former deputy secretary of the Australian Defense Department and professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, said the international military commitment increasingly looks like it has no exit strategy.
"I don't think additional troops will make much difference," he said. "In the end these are not problems that the military can solve, the problems have to be solved by political negotiation, or reconfiguration of East Timor's political structures to reflect the social realities. That process seems to be happening very slowly if at all."
Image: Manuel Faisco (cc)
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Reporter's Notebook: China
"Anytime people come across the trouble," my father, a peasant in Anhui province, said, "the first thing they have to consider is not 'Am I right?' but 'Do I know someone who is in charge? How much money must I spend to avoid the unfair treatment?'"
Read more in the Global Integrity Report...
Monday, February 4, 2008
China: Citizen protests over censorship rising?
The International Herald Tribune has an analysis of online censorship in China.
In recent months, Chinese censors have tightened controls over the Internet, often blacking out sites that had no discernible political content. In the process, they have fostered a backlash, as many people who previously had little interest in politics have become active in resisting the controls. And all of it comes at a time of increasing risk for those who choose to protest. Human rights advocates say that the government has been broadening its crackdown on any signs of dissent as the Olympic Games in Beijing draw near.Is this true? Are Chinese citizens more willing to express their frustrations with online censorship, and perhaps by extension, all official censorship? Leave us a comment with your take on the issue.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Anti-Corruption in China: The Key Findings
China Up Close {Part Two of Three}
Read part one.
Read part three.
Based on data from the Global Integrity Report: China
The findings of the study that follow reflect the ratings given to China on 23 categories of good governance, government accountability and anti-corruption indicators. Those categories comprise more than 300 specific questions scored by our in-country team as part of the Global Integrity Report: China.
The detailed findings, which led to previous conclusions about across-the-board weaknesses in: government transparency; government accountability; anti-corruption mechanisms; and methods to check excessive government authority and protect citizens against government abuse, are presented below.
+ More than half of the 23 governance sub-categories were assessed by Global Integrity to be “Very Weak” (the lowest possible rating).
+ Another 4 of the categories for China were listed as “Weak”, giving China a total of 17 (74% of) categories that were listed as “Weak” or “Very Weak”. The 74% finding compares to an average of 47% “weak” or “very weak” categories for all 55 nations assessed in the Global Integrity Report: 2007.
+ China failed to achieve a “strong” or “very strong” rating for any of the 23 assessed categories. In contrast, on average, the 55 nations in the Global Integrity report: 2007 were rated as “strong” or “very strong” in 7 out of 23 (or 31%) of the government accountability and anti-corruption categories in the assessment.
+ China’s combined score for all 23 categories placed it among the lowest 15% of the 55 countries assessed.
+ Only 7 of the other 54 countries in the Global Integrity report: 2007 had a bigger gap than China between the rating of their anti-corruption laws, on the one hand, and the rating of their actual implementation of anti-corruption practices, on the other.
+ The judiciary, the newly-formed Anti-Corruption and Anti-Bribery Bureau, and the Central Disciplinary Committee all lack the political independence – and political will – to go after senior government officials accused of graft without the Party’s approval.
+ In China, taking business disputes before a judge may not be an effective method of recourse for Western investors. While there may be a transparent method for choosing judges, they are in practice under the control of the Communist Party of China and are not subject to asset disclosure requirements.
+ Transparency around Chinese government procurement is poor, and tax discrimination is a major problem since firms with close relationships with the government generally benefit from tax reductions or other preferential treatment.
Read the conclusions with part three of three.
Millennium Challenge Corp. cuts Philippines aid
The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an American government aid agency, has restricted aid flowing to the Philippines due to concerns about corruption. The MCC is setting aside a prior decision to promote the country from "Threshold" to "Compact" aid status, which would have secured significant funding for development projects. The decision appears largely based on the World Bank Institute's aggregation of corruption perception surveys, which report a worsening public perception of corruption problems.
The Global Integrity data on the Philippines (2007, 2006, 2004), which examines the anti-corruption framework rather than public perceptions of corruption, show consistent -- though not very good -- performance in recent years. As we note on the cover of our 2007 report, an overall score change from 2006 to 2007 is not a trend, but reflects the inclusion of a new investigation of state-owned enterprises, an area where the Philippines performs poorly.
From ABS-CBN: The head of America’s chief global poverty-fighting arm said indications of worsening corruption in the Philippines is blocking the way to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional help. John Danilovich, Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), said they have “serious concerns” with corruption indicators for the Philippines. “The drop in performance was in fact very dramatic,” he told reporters during a briefing at the Foreign Press Center here on Wednesday, January 30.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
China: Big Stakes, Weak Safeguards, High Risks
China Up Close {Part One of Three}
Read part two: The details.
Read part three: Our conclusions.
Based on data from the Global Integrity Report: China
No foreign country holds more of its currency reserves in dollars and dollar-denominated financial instruments, such as U.S. Treasury bonds, than China. The country is the destination for massive and increasing investment by U.S.-based companies. China's sovereign investment funds are becoming an important investor in U.S. companies and private financial institutions. Recent toy- and food-safety scares have cast an ominous cloud over U.S. dependence on China as a major source of imported goods. In short, the stakes associated with the U.S.' economic relationship with China are huge and growing.
The stability and security of these financial, investment and trade relationships with China will depend heavily on the extent to which China is able to put in place safeguards that ensure government transparency and accountability; prevention of dangerous decisions driven by corruption and skewed by excessive government authority; and the protection of citizens, including journalists and whistleblowers, from government abuse.
The primary finding of the assessment is that critical anti-corruption safeguards are not well-established in China. Overall, the analysis found troubling, across-the-board weaknesses in: government transparency; government accountability; anti-corruption mechanisms; and methods to check excessive government authority and protect citizens against government abuse. This lack of safeguards, in turn, creates a social and economic environment that produces increased risks for the U.S. financial system, U.S. investors, and U.S. consumers of products made in China.
Read more with Part Two.
Clean Elections No Guarantee of Strong Democratic Society
New Report Assesses Anti-Corruption Mechanisms and Government Accountability in 55 Countries, Including First Investigation of
(Washington D.C.) – Although elections are often touted as the linchpin of governance reform efforts around the world, a new report finds long-term benefits offered by elections are often undermined by a lack of government accountability and the absence of strong anti-corruption mechanisms. The report, a major investigative study of 55 countries, was released today by Global Integrity, an international nonprofit organization that tracks global governance and corruption trends.
“We have to stop using elections as a simplistic litmus test for a government’s commitment to democracy,” said Global Integrity’s Managing Director Nathaniel Heller. “We now know there is little linkage between elections and the much tougher reforms that must be made, especially in countries at political crossroads such as Pakistan, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kenya.”
The Global Integrity Report: 2007 covers most of the Group of 8 (G8) countries as well as dozens of the world’s emerging markets and developing nations, from Argentina to China to Zambia. Rather than try and measure corruption directly, the report investigates and assesses the government accountability mechanisms and transparency measures needed to prevent corruption and promote good governance.
Many of the findings of the report should be sobering for policy makers and investors alike. The weaknesses found in China’s anti-corruption framework, for example, raise questions as to the true risks facing investors rushing to capitalize on the country’s economic boom– and to the risks Chinese investment funds pose to Western markets. “China’s lack of strong anti-corruption mechanisms could soon be to foreign investment what subprime mortgages have been to the U.S. economy,” stated Heller. “The message from our report to investors should sound a lot like ‘buyer beware’.”
Other major findings of the report include the following:
· The US and other G8 countries suffer from many of the same corruption challenges as developing countries, especially in election and campaign financing. While many observers tend to assume that wealthier countries have developed to a point where corruption is no longer a problem, Global Integrity’s 2007 data for the United States, France, Italy, Japan, and Canada paints a decidedly different picture.
· Despite the conventional wisdom that changes in governance and anti-corruption performance take many years to manifest themselves, several countries exhibited significant improvements or backsliding from 2006 to 2007. The biggest gainers in the past year were Bulgaria, Nepal and Azerbaijan; Nigeria and Georgia were the countries that experienced the greatest declines.
· Poor ratings for several close allies of the United States highlight the challenges the U.S. faces in promoting democratic reforms in countries where it has competing security interests. The report found that countries like Pakistan and Georgia posted ‘weak’ or ‘very weak’ ratings for many of the anti-corruption, accountability and transparency indicators.
· A widespread lack of government accountability among foreign aid recipients presents serious dilemmas for Western and multilateral aid agencies. Despite a growing awareness by aid donors of the need to direct aid to non-governmental stakeholders, like civil society groups, aid agencies continue working primarily with the very same executive branches that are often hindering democratic reforms.
“This report should be a roadmap for change and a wake-up call to policy makers, investors, and aid donors around the globe,” said Global Integrity’s International Director, Marianne Camerer. “It’s also a take-action toolkit for public officials and citizens who want to fight corruption and increase government accountability.”
The report is the product of months of on-the-ground reporting and data gathering by a team of more than 250 in-country journalists and researchers who prepared more than a million words of text and 20,000 data points for their respective countries. Twenty-four countries were repeated from Global Integrity’s 2006 assessments, while 31 were newly assessed.
To access the Global Integrity Report: 2007, please visit http://report.globalintegrity.org. For more information about the organization, visit http://www.globalintegrity.org. Global Integrity is an independent, non-profit organization tracking governance and corruption trends around the world. Global Integrity works with local teams of researchers and journalists to monitor openness and accountability. Its data and reporting are used routinely by aid donors, governments, grassroots advocates, and investors to prioritize governance challenges in countries and develop roadmaps for reform.
Global Integrity is grateful to the Legatum Institute for Global Development ( www.ligd.org) for its continued support of Global Integrity’s work. LIGD is an independent policy, advocacy and advisory organisation within the Legatum group of companies (www.legatum.com). The Institute’s mission is to research and promote those principles that drive the creation of global prosperity and the expansion of human liberty and well-being, including the rule of law, transparency, and accountable government as the pillars of a prosperous and free society. Other supporters of the Global Integrity Report: 2007 were the Australian Agency for International Development, the Wallace Global Fund, and the World Bank.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Washington Post: Suharto wasn't THAT bad
The Washington Post publishes an op-ed by journalist Pranay Gupte claiming that recently deceased Indonesian dictator Suharto's rule wasn't all that bad -- because he was ok with birth control, controlled population growth, and didn't have to torture people to do it.
Setting the bar pretty low, aren't we? Gupte writes:
I am not one for endorsing dictatorships, nepotism and state-condoned corruption. But you could look far beyond Suharto and see worse. I don't think that even in his sternest periods of rule, Suharto was the kind of nail-puller and torturer that, say, Mobutu of Zaire was.
That is to say, let's be a little more careful about making sweeping judgments about Third World rulers, even those who come to office through unconventional means. Pulling nails and murdering people wasn't in the Indonesian tradition, at least not in Suharto's time.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
New Blog Design
With the help of some talented programmers who offer their work to the open-source community, as well as some good old fashioned poking-around-with-code, we have a new layout for the Commons. Not all features are up to speed yet, but the outline is here.