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Anti-Corruption Actions
Fighting corruption in developing countries:
- The EU should strengthen monitoring mechanisms to ensure that EU development aid, including budget support, is used in a transparent and accountable manner by the governments that receive it.
- The EU should take all necessary measures to prevent corruption in the implementation of aid programmes.
- The EU should help developing countries establish or strengthen their own legislation and institutions to fight corruption more effectively.
- The EU should provide countries with assistance in establishing and implementing transparent and accountable procurement systems.
- The EU should ensure the transparent management of EU funds through the publication of all EU fund recipients, including beneficiaries of external aid.
- The EU should request consultations with the respective government if any serious cases of corruption are exposed. If no remedial measures are taken, the EU should consider appropriate measures, including the suspension of financial assistance.
- The EU should publish what it gives, providing timely, accessible, relevant, uniform, disaggregated and easy to understand data on aid disbursals.
- The EU should ensure transparent and predictable aid flows to partner countries, so that it is clear to recipient countries what can be expected.
- The EU should ensure rigorous monitoring and compliance with the Common Position on the Export of Arms, in order to prevent obscure practices often involved in arms sales, which rob governments of revenue and exacerbate violence. The EU should also strictly implement safety regulations in order to reduce the transportation of arms, by air and sea, for destabilising or illicit purposes.
Combating corruption in natural resource-rich countries:
- The EU should require extractives companies regulated in EU jurisdictions to fully disclose payments made to governments of the countries where they operate.
- The EU should encourage resource-rich countries to adhere to the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) and provide EITI with enhanced political, financial and technical support.
- The EU should encourage governments and stock exchanges to demand higher standards in the reporting of revenue payments by oil, gas and mining companies, notably reporting on a country-by-country basis. The EU should also support the civil society campaign ‘Publish What You Pay’ (PWYP).
- The EU should continue promoting the fight against illegal logging and the trade of illicit or conflict timber by outlawing all illegally-sourced or unlicensed timber and timber product imports into the EU. The EU should also strengthen the ‘EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan’ (FLEGT).
- The EU should support and strengthen the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme.
Breaking the links between the financial sector and corruption:
- The EU should secure greater transparency and public accountability, adopt a consistent and internationally coordinated framework for the regulation and supervision of all EU financial institutions and ensure that the new regulatory system to be constructed in the wake of the financial crisis includes a re-evaluation of the effectiveness of the anti-money laundering regulations.
- The EU should better coordinate its efforts to halt tax evasion and the illicit financial activities that are made possible through use of "offshore heavens" and advocate, at the global level, for strict regulation and control of off-shores.
- The EU should push for legislative changes that specify that if a country cannot account transparently for its natural resource revenues, EU-based banks should not be allowed to do business with its government, its state-owned companies or its officials or their family members in their private capacity, unless the bank can demonstrate that the funds it is banking or loaning are not proceeds of corruption or contributing to corruption.
- The EU should promote appropriate criminal investigations in compliance with existing EU regulations and impose strong sanctions where corruption, insider trading and other abuses are found.
- The EU should promote the above-mentioned measures to apply in the entire European Economic Area (EEA) and in Switzerland.
Ending impunity:
- The EU should increase judicial and police cooperation in the fight against corruption and simplify cross-border investigations and prosecutions.
- The EU should do more to help Member States seize and confiscate proceeds of criminal activities to ensure that crime truly does not pay.
- The EU, the US and other partners should share a list of officials (and their immediate family members) against whom there is credible evidence of corrupt activity; targeted individuals should be ineligible for ownership of property in EU Members States and the assets of targeted individuals held in European bank accounts should be frozen.
- The EU should ensure that illegally-acquired assets held in European bank accounts are identified, frozen and repatriated to the country of origin, in line with mutual legal assistance requirements and asset recovery provisions under the UNCAC.
Strengthening EU and worldwide anti-corruption capabilities:
- The EU and every EU Member States should ratify, implement and enforce all international and regional Anti-corruption Conventions, in particular the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) (already ratified by the European Community and a majority of EU Member States).
- The EU and every EU Member State should actively advocate on a global level for the ratification, implementation and enforcement of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) and gradually consider it as a prerequisite for trade relations and development assistance programmes.
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