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How can executive agencies in developing countries implement international conventions against corruption?

For over 10 years, organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Council of Europe (CoE) and the United Nations (UN) have been helping developing countries adopt legal measures to fight corruption. However, such work has had questionable impacts on reducing corruption. These conventions, while being ratified by national parliaments, are not being implemented in executive agencies most prone to corruption such as traffic police, the police, customs and tax inspection. Such agency-level implementation will not have occurred due to:

• a lack of jurisprudential tradition, helping to inform judges where the law ‘is silent’ 
  
•  no provision for the political and economic cost the provisions of anti-corruption law such as criminalisation of bribery and international asset seizure
  

This paper aims to show policy-makers how they might apply legal reasoning and economic analysis to regulatory issues raised by the international conventions against corruption.

In the abstract (without reference to a particular legal system), the paper derived a test for corruption, complicity, contributory negligence, and appropriate jurisdiction for the investigations and prosecution of national and international corruption cases. The paper also presented ways in which regulations implementing the anti-corruption conventions could be financed and how damages could be allocated between parties. Finally, the intuitions developed throughout the paper were used to suggest a number of articles which could be included in executive agency regulation aimed at implementing the OECD, CoE and UN conventions.

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