It’s International Anti-Corruption Day, and Global Integrity is having an internal debate over whether anyone should notice. Created with great fanfare as an advocacy tool to build momentum for the UN Convention Against Corruption, this “Day” is leftover hype for a specific policy that has already launched, crashed and burned. Forgive us for not breaking…
In Estonia, new draft legislation would allow journalists to be incarcerated for up to one year for keeping their sources from the authorities. Reporting on this threat from firsthand experience is Tarmo Vahter, a reporter for weekly newspaper Eesti Ekspress. My second and thus far last questioning happened a year ago in the basement of…
In recent years, a handful of microfinance institutions (MFIs) have come under fire for charging low-income clients extremely high interest rates for their microcredit loans. The 120 percent annual interest rates offered by Mexico’s leading MFI, Compartamos, has produced profits but dubious public benefit, provoking outrage among fellow practitioners. A new venture hopes separate the…
Disclosure: The World Bank is a funder of Global Integrity. Governance has been one of the key issues that the World Bank has been focusing on and pushing for on recent years. But, how does the World Bank fare itself in this department? In the fall of 2008 Robert Zoellick, the current World Bank president,…
Transparency International (TI) publishes its annual index of perceptions of national levels of corruptions today. Here is the official TI press release, and discussion on TI’s Space for Transparency blog. As has become tradition, newspapers throughout the world are quick to point out how Country X has improved (or dropped) in the 2009 CPI ranking…
We don’t enjoy being the skunks at the garden party, but we can’t help but feel that today’s announcement of a new self-monitoring mechanism for signatories to the UN Convention Against Corruption is little more than an expansion of bureaucratic turf with virtually zero potential for changing lives on the ground. To quote the UN…