Relevant international organizations and their constructive policies. The international community has long recognized that attempts to combat organized and serious crime require cooperation and consistency across national boundaries. Organized crime generates a vast amount of criminal property and uses various techniques to move the proceeds around the globe.
Relevant International Organizations And Their Constructive Policies
In response to this global challenge, a range of international bodies have contributed to the development of anti-bribery and corruption laws and standards. International bodies have been crucial in developing globally recognized legal definitions of anti-bribery and corruption and accepted standards of good practice for regulated entities. They are also continually at the forefront of identifying trends and emerging threats in bribery and corruption and in recognizing and documenting the links between money laundering and the threat to international peace, stability, and economic growth.
Laws criminalizing the handling of criminal property are designed principally to take the benefit out of crime by ensuring that the proceeds of crime can be recognized, reported, traced, and confiscated. Economies supported by the proceeds of criminal activity are notoriously unstable and pose significant risks to neighboring countries and those with close economic ties. The impetus for international governmental action against money laundering also stems from a fear of national or regional economic destabilization resulting from over-exposure to illegally derived funds.
United Nations (UN)
In the context of the UN’s efforts to prevent and combat corruption and terrorism, the expanded program of work for technical assistance is developed to counter bribery and corruption. This is based on mandates recommended by the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice and approved by the UN General Assembly. These mandates, carried out by UN’s Terrorism Prevention Branch (TPB) within the Division for Treaty Affairs (DTA), include the provision of technical assistance and advisory services to countries in their fight against corruption and terrorism.
Consequently, the UN’s operational activities focus on strengthening the legal regime against corruption activities. It aims to assist the member states in their struggle against illicit drugs, crime, and terrorism. It is also resolved to intensify efforts to fight transnational crime in all its manifestations, to increase efforts to implement the commitment to counter the world drug problem and to take concerted action against international terrorism.
G7 And G20
Recognizing that public procurement is highly vulnerable to illegal activities such as corruption, it requires a range of techniques and approaches to prevent it, as also recognized in the G20 Principles for Promoting Integrity in Public Procurement and the OECD Principles for Enhancing Integrity in Public Procurement, to prevent corruption, especially through:
(a) Publishing contracting data for national public procurement across the contracting cycle in a machine-readable format, consistent with domestic laws and regulations and, where possible, principles of open data standards such as the G8 Open Data Charter and the G20 Anti-Corruption Open Data Principles.
(b) Enhancing transparency in the entire public procurement process, conscious of the corruption risk in infrastructure-related public procurement in terms of its complex process, as well as its scale.
(c) Promoting institutional audit capacity and effective audit of the performance of public procurement contracts.
(d) Demonstrating our commitment to fiscal transparency. We stress the key role that could be played by IMF Fiscal Transparency Evaluations and all other equivalent standards.
OECD
OECD emphasizes that effective law enforcement cooperation requires robust technical capacities worldwide and that building the capacity of countries that are vulnerable to corruption is essential in coping the corruption, especially through:
(a) Strengthening anti-bribery and corruption practices and improving auditing and accounting processes, integrity reform, anti-money laundering, asset recovery processes, as well as improving the budget formulation, expenditure standards, and transparency in the public procurement process.
(b) Promoting technical assistance in support of the effective implementation of the anti-bribery and corruption practices by all UN member countries and states.
(c) Encouraging and providing support to other nations to complete public expenditure transparency assessment, such as those of the World Bank and IMF, and OECD to identify areas of needed reform.
(d) Calling upon international organizations to give priority to anti-bribery and corruption in their advice and support to countries and supporting capacity building of civil society and journalists to contribute to anti-corruption reform and expose corruption and bribery.
Financial Action Task Force (FATF)
The most important and influential of the international bodies is FATF. FATF is an intergovernmental body whose purpose is to establish international standards and develop and promote policies, both at national and international levels, to combat illegal activities, including corruption, money laundering, and the financing of terrorism.
The FATF attaches great importance to the fight against corruption: corruption can bring catastrophic harm to economic development, the fight against organized crime, and respect for the law and effective governance. The objectives of FATF are to set global standards and promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory, and operational measures for combating illegal activities and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system.
Corruption and money laundering are intrinsically linked. Similar to other serious crimes, corruption offenses, such as bribery and theft of public funds, are generally committed for obtaining private gain. Money laundering is the process of concealing illicit gains that were generated from criminal activity. By successfully laundering the proceeds of a corruption offense, the illicit gains may be enjoyed without fear of being confiscated.
The FATF recognizes the link between corruption and money laundering, including how AML/CFT measures help combat corruption. This is why corruption issues are taken into account during the FATF mutual evaluation process, which assesses countries’ compliance with the FATF Recommendations. The FATF considers how effectively the AML and CFT measures are implemented in the organization by considering the number of investigations, prosecutions, and convictions for money laundering and the amount of property confiscated about money laundering or underlying predicate offenses, including corruption and bribery (Recommendation 32).
The FATF considers whether the country can demonstrate that it has a solid framework of measures to prevent and combat corruption through respect for transparency, good governance principles, high ethical and professional requirements, and established a reasonably efficient court system to ensure that judicial decisions are properly enforced. These elements are important because significant weaknesses or shortcomings in these areas may impede the effective implementation of the FATF Recommendations. Corruption is often driven by greed. Countries can remove a main objective and incentive for engaging in corrupt activities by depriving the perpetrators and others of the benefit of such crimes.
To do so, countries must have effective laws and procedures to freeze, seize and confiscate stolen assets, the proceeds of corruption, and laundered property while also protecting the rights of bona fide third parties. The authorities should have sufficient powers to trace assets, including in cooperation with foreign counterparts. Countries should consider sharing assets confiscated due to coordinated law enforcement actions and consider establishing funds into which confiscated assets may be deposited for law enforcement, health, education, or other appropriate purposes. These requirements facilitate the protection and compensation of the victims of corruption and bribery, and the recovery of stolen assets, even if such assets have been concealed abroad.
World Bank
The World Bank became publicly interested in money laundering and corruption rather late compared to other international bodies and standards setters. It was not until 2000 that the World Bank commissioned a study on model laws and enforcement procedures for addressing insider dealing and conflicts of interest – not as high profile perhaps as illicit drugs as a predicate offense but generating criminal proceeds nonetheless.
Globally, the World Bank collaborates with the IMF, FATF, and the FATF-Style Regional Bodies (FSRB), G20 Countries, the UNODC, the organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Conference of States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption.
As part of its Governance/Anti-Corruption agenda, the World Bank’s Financial Market Integrity (FMI) program, as part of its Governance/Anti-Corruption agenda, provides client countries and World Bank staff with tools for increasing transparency and ‘going after the dirty money.’ Corruption, tax evasion, and environmental crime are all crimes-for-profit, and criminals want to access that profit. FMI introduces tools that focus on the money flows as an additional tool for fighting these crimes and ultimately promoting a transparent and inclusive financial system.
Final Thoughts
A stable set of norms and rules governing the behavior of states and other actors in the international system is known as an international organization, also known as an international institution or an intergovernmental organization.
Organizations, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and NATO, may be established by treaty or as an instrument governed by international law and possessing its own legal personality. International organizations are primarily made up of member states, but other entities, such as other international organizations, may also be included. Observer status can also be granted to entities including states.
