Le processus d’émergence du paradigme de contrôle des fonds communautaires qui a trouvé une réalisation dans la création de l’Office Européen de lutte contre les fraudes (OLAF) en 1999, illustre les tentatives d’institutionnalisation d’un espace judiciaire européen. Depuis les débuts de la mise sur agenda des problèmes d’évasion des ressources propres dans les années 1970, la formulation de la problématique et l’imputation des responsabilités sont essentiellement le fait des organes financiers européens. Cependant le contexte des années 1990 qui voit la dénonciation des délinquances économiques et financières portée par les juges dans plusieurs arènes médiatiques nationales et qui trouvent un relai dans les réseaux d’experts judiciaires européens, vont infléchir le débat vers l’instauration d’un Parquet Européen présenté comme seul garant possible d’un contrôle de légalité des fonds européens. Toutefois, les rendez-vous institutionnels successifs depuis le Traité de Nice tendent à invalider cette vision et réorienter le débat vers la promotion de la coopération des agences de contrôle nationales. Le renforcement de l’OLAF paraît bien compromis au regard de cette préférence des Etats membre pour les outils intergouvernementaux aujourd’hui privilégiés pour assurer une gestion transparentes des ressources européennes. L’Agence offre aujourd’hui trop peu de garanties pour relever les défis de la lutte contre le corruption au niveau communautaire.

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The purpose of this paper is to address issues that may concern Anti-Corruption Agencies [ACA] working within the European Union [EU] countries, or those countries with ambitions to join the EU. The issues will also have wider relevance with the mandatory requirements of the United Nations Convention The issues concern the rationale for setting up an ACA (markets), the use of business planning techniques to determine the most appropriate organizational structure to deliver its intended objectives (management), operational activity (managed work) and performance (measurement). The paper uses examples from Africa on how and why ACAs fail before discussing initial research on ACAs in two recently-joined EU states to suggest what needs to be done in terms of, first, deciding if an ACA is necessary and, second, what markets, management, work and measurement issues need to be addressed.

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The paper draws on the findings of my field research on five African ACAs and on a critique of the academic and practitioner literature on ACAs. It addresses a central question: why do governments/donors create and support ACAs when their performance almost always fails to meet their sponsors’ and funders' expectations? I argue that those who establish and sustain ACAs have only a limited appreciation of the specific difficulties of ACAs in investigating and preventing corruption and an inadequate understanding of their organisational design and development in particular institutional environments. This gives rise to unrealistic performance expectations and generates cyclical disruption to the resourcing and operational effectiveness of ACAs. I suggest that we need to identify distinct organisational stages for ACAs and link them with the differing cycles of donor and government involvement. I find that there is a profound lack of synchronicity between ACAs, their host governments and international donors. It is this lack of synchronicity which leads to the disruption of organisational development and the consequential failure to meet performance expectations.

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The presentation provides a comparison of different models of anti-corruption bodies in South East Europe. Particular popularity in the region have gained the so-called Anti-corruption Commissions which are rarely empowered with investigative powers, but are involved in building partnerships with civil society groups, preparing comprehensive (omnibus) anti-corruption strategies, action plans, etc. Initially, the work of these bodies had a positive effect largely in terms of raising public awareness concerning the issue of corruption. Gradually, however, publics grew tired of this type of activities: paradoxically, there is a point at which awareness of the spread of corruption turns into cynicism regarding anti-corruption activities as a whole, perceptions of powerlessness of state bodies to produce more “tangible results”, etc. The ultimate result is falling confidence in the political establishment, the rise of populist leaders and parties, discontent with the constitutional order and calls for ever more radical reforms. Some of the countries of South East Europe have experienced and experience this negative dynamics - it is of course not produced by anti-corruption activities per se, but these activities do help the negative dynamics. If this analysis is correct, apparently there is a need for rethinking of the almost universal recipe of anti-corruption activities pursued in the region which could be described as: setting up of a commission, producing of an omnibus strategy, producing of annual reports of implementation, schemes of monitoring, indices of corruption. Countries in the region have explored other alternative ways of fighting corruption. First, an alternative strategy is the general strengthening of the institutions of the democratic state – all administrative capacity building projects do have an anti-corruption angle as a rule. Secondly, currently several states have created specific investigative and prosecutorial agencies to tackle the issue of corruption. Romania has set up Anti-corruption Prosecutorial Office, Bulgaria is probably going to follow suit by creating a special unit in the Supreme Prosecutorial Office specifically targeting corruption. In Macedonia, there has been a Commission with some investigative powers for some time, etc. The results of this change of anti-corruption strategy are difficult to assess at the moment: the development is too recent. The paper will provide some preliminary evaluation, and will offer an analysis of the indicators of success or failure which might be applied.

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Anti-corruption policies and institutions are often copied from one country to another. Hong Kong’s ICAC has, for example, provided a model for states in Australia, while Tanzanian models of a ‘leadership code’ administered by the Ombudsman were influential in the South Pacific. However, transplanted institutions may not fit, or flourish, in their new environments. The paper asks what arguments from sociology and public policy can tell us about the prospects for transfer of ACAs, and how these prospects might be improved.

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Drawing on original, on-the-ground data and reporting from a 2004 pilot project in 25 diverse countries, the presentation will examine commonalities and differences between individual European anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) as well as between those same European agencies and their international counterparts in Latin America, Africa, North America, and Asia. Examined in a broader international political and socioeconomic context, the presentation will analyze which structures and functions are unique to Europe and which are shared with ACAs in other parts of the world and what those similarities and differences mean for strengthening effective ACAs in Europe in the future.

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The aim of this paper is to give a brief account on how the fight against corruption in Portugal is paralyzed, and will remain so, due to three major interrelated factors: the corruption involving certain public powers; the conjunctural incapacity of the Public Prosecution Service to detect and fight the phenomenon; and the deployment of a strategy for combating crime that, for various reasons, ignores corruption. This inertia results from the persistence of what I have termed “nodes in the system”, where “nodes” are understood as a set of chronic incapacities in the enforcement and investigation apparatuses whose mechanical and undefined interaction prevents the problems not only from being solved but even from being detected. These “nodes” are of a mixed character, made up of a lack of modern working methods and the lack of an appropriate crime policy – in short, the lack of a capacity to react. Created inside and outside of the penal system, these “nodes” change the social and political representation of the punitive function of the state and produce uncontrollable degeneration in the principal functions that it performs. In the case in hand, they themselves represent a serious obstacle to the fight against corruption, in particular that of a political nature.

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