RESEARCH PROJECT:

CRIME AND CULTURE

Research Group Germany

Project Research Phase II: Interviews

Aspects of Fighting Corruption

Target Group Politics

• Granting/receiving advantages is ultimately rooted in the exchange relations that make up the fabric of societies based on market economy.

• Therefore there will always be spaces of exchange relations that cannot be covered by the regulating instruments of law and penal sanction.

• Nevertheless the fact that there are more or less clear societal perceptions and claims of what can reasonably be considered illegitimate helps

sharpen the sensibilities about illegitimate conduct

• Raising sensibilities: a workable basis for prevention policies in the sense of rendering the illegitimate either illegal or very difficult to be carried on with.

• Politicians turning over to private business immediately after quitting or retiring from politics should be perceived as illegitimate. A possible preventive approach would be to prolong the transition time up to two years.

• The plan to set up an anti corruption register must again be put on the agenda of legislative action.

• Raising awareness that corruption means damage: once it is certain that the image damage for the company/state institution involved is high, this can function as deterrent.

– Shuffling with jobs and posts in the party apparatus. This should be considered as illegitimate (sign of favouritism, power machinations, granting advantages and corruption).

– All those cases in which forms of linkage of politics and private interests are perceived to be illegitimate. This holds also true of the communal management of public affairs.

– When the ministerial bureaucracy makes use of external experts in formulating law drafts. The suspicion of illegitimate intrusion of private interests in state legislation is more than reasonable.

– Overspending during elections campaigns.

– Exposing all additional revenues the MPs draw from other occupations. The exposure does not target primarily the level of income, but rather where it comes from.

– Conspicuous donations to MPs.

Target Group Judiciary

•Raising public awareness can of course not be sustained without establishing certain control regularities.

•Trying to raise public sensibilities either through a) increasing intolerance towards illegitimate (corrupt) conduct, or b) putting observation on a regular basis,

are however forms of prevention that may not go deep enough.

•The motivational set-up of corrupt conduct contains much more than the quest of money or power.

•It involves certain values that are for example based on

a) a narrow utilitaristic approach that reduces education to a purely success oriented, pragmatic attitude to knowledge

b) the failure of the family to transmit exemplary behavioural patterns.

Raising public awareness that the prevailing attitudes of economic or social success have a corrosive effect on the moral fabric of culture – ethical rules of action being observed only if they comply with or do not decisively go against the logic of economic performance.

Target Group Police

•Corruption transcends what is merely codified as legally sanctionable.

•Police investigations should have a structural approach: a)Systematic detection of probable causes b)special skills to reconstruct the ‘logic’ of the casec)Experience requirements

•Institutional actors should try translate their common sense experience of suspicious regularities in operationalisable material evidence of wrong-doing.

•Additionally: supplementation of the institutional role acting by skills that bear upon a type of knowledge not directly flowing from the groundwork of the procedures of investigation/prosecution.

Target Group Media/Journalism

Journalistic work is essential to corruption prevention:

a)It traces corrupt conduct down to its social bearings, or conversely

b) It follows the course of everyday co-operative action from the ‘bottom’ up till it manifests criminal dimensions.

•Journalistic work depends on the information flow from the prosecution authorities.

•However, access to required information is not always easy, especially since expert lawyers

a) deploy legal means to block off further investigations,

b) deter the prosecution authorities from co-operating with the press supplying it with information.

• General attorneys should therefore hold the communication channels to the press upright.

• In order to make journalistic work more effective, some prosecution deficits need to be removed:

a) The long time it takes to bring a case to court,

b) Convictions not being hart enough,

c) Overloaded prosecution personal, and

d) Prescription times not being conform with

the fact corruption cases demanding a great

deal of time to be worked on.

Target Group Civil Society (TI)

• The anti-corruption agenda is part of a reform process, which includes institutional transformation and a change of socio-cultural mentalities.

•Fighting corruption as part of an on-going process: reforming socio-cultural attitudes, i. e. committing people to it and ensuring that things are grounded in people’s perceptions.

•Setting up the Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres (ALACs) raises the chances of such a commitment.

Strengthening them implies the following:

•Since the TI struggles for its own economic sustainability, further funding should be ensured

•the system of ALACs should be consolidated and expanded in other countries

•Regarding the cooperation between TI and ALACs the demand for the systematisation of the evaluation of incoming information should be met

•A centralised database for the collection of statistics should be promoted

•Centralised data processing leads to targeted knowledge and this in turn leads to concrete intervention steps regarding changes in the penal law.

Target Group Economy

• The Business Conduct Guidelines and Code of Ethics is no guarantee that corruption will not take place so long as it does not function as frame of reference for everyday ‘business as usual’.

• No distinction should be made between the ‘management culture’ and the ‘business culture’. The argument that they should be distinguished helps cover up structural corruption.

• This is the case even when the top-management assumes responsibility for wrong-doing: this functions more often than not as exculpation of structural corrupt conduct.

• Structural corruption: raising economic performance (i.e. winning new markets) through rule-violating action (briberies). Career advancement is often considered incompatible with the rules of fair play.

• ‘Economic coercion’ will continue to be regarded as unavoidable reason for corrupt conduct as long as the employees (including top-management) put corporate interests (i.e. profit maximization) above certain rules of ethical conduct.

• The corporatist identification with ‘overriding interests’ should be loosened: the strong interdependencies between management and labour (under Germany's consensus-style codetermination management system) make employee works councils susceptible to corruption.