The international community recognised that corruption undermines democracy when states adopted the UN Convention against Corruption in 2003. Over 15 years have passed, and the latest Corruption Perceptions Index
showed that most countries around the world have made little to no progress in the fight against corruption.
In the worst affected countries, the failure to combat public sector corruption has meant suffering for ordinary people, who continue to be denied basic public services, deprived of economic opportunities and are locked into poverty. In many others, it has been a decade during which policies and decisions were skewed in the interests of a powerful few, while accountability mechanisms were weakened or even captured.
At the same time, countries with strong rule of law and low levels of public sector corruption have become hubs for dirty money, allowing embezzled funds and bribe payments to be laundered through their financial systems and real estate. So, by enabling or even fuelling transnational corruption, established democratic nations have themselves contributed to the current democratic decline.
Increasingly, people in these advanced economies are facing hardship too. Corrupt cash is bursting into their property markets – contributing to the homelessness crisis. The systemic weaknesses that allow dirty money to flow across borders with such ease are also exploited by authoritarian regimes to exert influence on democracies.
