When and why did the International Day against Corruption appear?

Society has always treated corruption in two ways. But, since the end of the 18th century, everything has changed radically. The main slogan of liberal reforms in the West was that the state apparatus can exist only for the benefit of its subordinate people. Therefore, subjects "feed" the government in exchange for compliance with laws by officials. In addition, according to the American law adopted in 1787, taking a bribe is a serious crime for which even the president can be impeached. Many people then expressed a desire to make the World Anti-Corruption Day from the date of the adoption of this law and celebrate it on an annual basis. But the government did not support this popular impulse.

The society increasingly influenced the quality ofactivities of politicians. With the tightening of state regulation and parties, episodes of collusion between representatives of big business and the political elite provoked considerable concern. Officials understood that it was necessary to organize measures to combat corruption. But all this remained at the level of discussion.

The history of corruption was also conditioned bythe revival of world economic relations. Transnational corporations, concluding contracts with foreign buyers, quite legally included the cost of "gifts" in the costs of negotiations.

Known cases

Long before the International Day camethe fight against corruption, in America there was a scandal involving the well-known company Lockheed. To sell their planes, which were not of very high quality, it gave big bribes to officials and politicians of Japan, Germany and other countries. Approximately from that time, people began to think about the global nature of this problem, which hinders the international development of relations.

No less illustrative are examples of corruption in the post-socialist countries in the dashing 1990s, when the scope of this phenomenon could be compared with the situation in developing countries.

Very often there were paradoxical situations,when the same persons occupied important positions in both commercial and public sectors of the economy. As a result, most officials violated the law not only by obtaining bribes, but also by protecting their own commercial interests.

World evil

Over time, the world community has come to the opinion,that corruption is an evil that harms not one person, a group of individuals or an individual state, but the whole world. This opinion has developed not from scratch. The whole reason was mass bribes by corporations of senior officials abroad. Corruption hindered the development of many countries, negatively affecting world trade. At the same time, states, where this phenomenon reached the highest level, did not become confined to the third world: in the 1990s, in the former socialist countries, the process of liberalization was accompanied by unthinkable misconduct. Against the background of these events, some states decided that combating crime and corruption would be a priority of their domestic policy. We go further.

"1995 is the year of corruption"

It was this headline that was seen on the mainpage readers of the New Year issue of the newspaper "Financial Times". In the article, American exporting companies complained that they were losing large contracts because of foreign laws that forbid bribing officials from another country. On the contrary, in many OSCE states bribes to foreign partners were not forbidden and could even be deducted when paying taxes. For example, German corporations spent on this about 5.5 billion dollars every year. To change the situation, some European officials even wanted to organize a fund to fight corruption. But in the end they came to a different, more effective solution. In late 1997, all OSCE countries signed the "Convention on the Prevention of Bribery of Bribes to Foreigners in the Conduct of International Operations".

Connecting the UN

In 2003, the history of corruption occurredsignificant event. Thanks to the UN, the topic of combating this phenomenon was brought to the international level. In November, the General Assembly adopted the "UN Convention against Corruption". This document was opened for signature on December 9, 2003 in the small town of Merida (Mexico). At the initiative of the United Nations, this date was proclaimed as the International Day Against Corruption. The states that agreed to sign the Convention recognized that money laundering, embezzlement of budget funds and bribes are criminal offenses. And one of the provisions of the document read: "Funds must be returned to the country from which they came as a result of corruption." Russia signed the Convention one of the first.

Ten years later

December 9, 2013 was anotherInternational Anti-Corruption Day, and exactly ten years have passed since the signing of the UN Convention. At the moment, under the document there are signatures of 140 states. 80 countries have ratified the Convention. Among them are Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Russia, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Ukraine. At the then summit of the G20, all the countries included in it promised that they would necessarily ratify the UN Convention.

Conclusion

In 2013, before the Internationalday of struggle against corruption, the World Bank published financial data reflecting the dimensions of this phenomenon on a global scale. For developing countries, the amounts varied from 20 to 40 billion dollars a year.

According to the National Anti-Corruptioncommittee, the annual turnover of the Russian corruption market is about 300 billion dollars. In 2003, at the time of signing the Convention, this figure was 100 times less. That is, the issue of the effect of this document on the circulation of corrupt money flows remains open. And hardly any additional measures will help here. Even if we set up an international fund to fight corruption, the result will be approximately the same.