Commission’s decision to withdraw Anti-Corruption Report Widely Criticised

The European Commission was supposed to publish its second Anti-Corruption Report last year, but after a series of delays it has now been withdrawn and will no longer be published. Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans confirmed to the European Parliament last week that they had decided to scrap the report but promised to MEPs, who have heavily criticised this decision, that corruption is still an important topic.

However, now even the researchers who were working on the Commission’s draft report have publicly called for it to be published [1], adding their voices to those of MEPs, civil society organisations and others. The researchers claim that the research, which was coordinated by Price Waterhouse Coopers and drafted by a network of national experts, was already almost complete. They criticise the decision to withdraw the report and highlight that the impact of this controversial report “was certainly feared by some Member States”.

This could be because the report contained a series of recommendations, country per country, to improve the fight against corruption. It examined various anti-corruption laws, identifying those that were not being properly applied in practice. The idea was to have 5 key points of improvement for all 28 Member States. But apparently, after regular, intense communication over the years, suddenly, by the end of last year the researchers were left completely in the dark about any further progress.

This situation cannot continue. The Commission’s argumentation that anti-corruption work can be subsumed into the European semester is completely flawed. To start with, under the European Semester there were only 9 Member States that received country-specific recommendations. In addition, the European semester process only focusses on the economic side of corruption. What about all the preventable deaths, what about the environment, what about justice and the rule of law?

The question therefore remains: How will the European Union properly monitor and assess corruption risks that are related for example to Parliamentary ethics, or to political financing, or to issues like the revolving door, without this report?

The answer is that we must continue to push for the report to be finalised and published, and for the EU to finally sign up fully to the UN Convention against Corruption and the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption.

[1] See the letter here: https://www.jura.uni-augsburg.de/lehrende/professoren/kubiciel/downloads/kubiciel/continuation_anti_corruption_report.pdf