Happy International Anti-Corruption Day
The day before International Anti-Corruption Day, the Turkish Parliament celebrated by--well, read it yourself:
The Turkish Parliament passed a controversial bill late Wednesday that reduces sentences for public employees who abuse their power, legislation critics have derided as being a “get out of jail free” card.
Once the law goes into effect, 25 deputies – including 13 from the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which drafted the bill – will avoid the risk of jail time in any of the 50 ongoing cases against them. AKP deputies are involved in 32 of the cases.
Here are a few more headlines from today's papers here to put this in context.
Turks pay more bribes than world average, corruption study says:
One in three Turks has paid a bribe in the last year, which is higher than the global average of 25 percent, according to a study released Thursday to mark International Anti-Corruption Day.
“Corruption is becoming a ‘trend’ rather than remaining a ‘taboo,’ as it used to be in the past,” said Sion Assidon, chairman of the board of directors of Transparency International, or TI, which released the report.
New law partly kills transparency:
A long-awaited draft law on the Court of Auditors adopted in the Turkish Parliament last Friday lacks a principal mechanism of making state institutions more transparent and accountable.
This is because the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) deleted a word in an article in the law that has inflicted serious injury to the principle of transparency. ... With this change in the law, inspectors will not be able to question any of the institutions over any seemingly unnecessary expenses that run contrary to the public interest. Inspections at institutions will be based on internal criteria set forth by institutions themselves, whereas international standards in auditing require that inspections be made to see whether institutions abide by the principles of productivity and efficacy, as well as make economically prudent decisions.
And finally, Turkey's Prime Minister Erdoğan Threatens to Sue America:
Foreign leaders, rivals and allies, often find it useful to take anti-American positions, but Turkish prime minister Recep Tayip Erdoğan has taken the rarest of steps in threatening to sue the U.S. State Department in both national and international courts for defamation. At issue is the insinuation, laid out in U.S. diplomatic cables purloined by WikiLeaks, that Erdoğan is corrupt.
God bless the Turkish sense of humor.
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May '10
Re: Happy International Anti-Corruption Day
Hey Claire, why is it that this law is not a party-killer politically? The U.S. system requires the corruption to be more subtle. Are Turkish citizens just not as engaged politically as Americans? Are they just so conditioned and jaded that they've given up caring? The ballot box doesn't seem to be properly functioning as a check on abuse.
Re: Happy International Anti-Corruption Day
Excellent question, especially since one of the chief reasons the AKP came to power--according to polls--was because the electorate thought they would be able to bring corruption under control. Partly, certainly, it's that the electorate is jaded and thinks "They're all bastards, at least these bastards don't seem to be making things that much worse." Partly it's much more complicated. Have a look at this excellent piece, for example, about the closed-list electoral system and the way this contributes to this problem. Add to this the problem of these issues and their ramifications not being all that well understood by much the electorate (this stuff about "auditing" would sound like gobbledygook to voters in rural Anatolia), and you've got a problem that's very difficult to solve.
May '10
Re: Happy International Anti-Corruption Day
I see. The party's picking the candidates makes the parliamentarians likely to "bend to the will of their party leadership rather than to act in their electorate's interest," creating a governing class, etc.
Similar to Daniel Hannan's point in The New Road to Serfdom about the virtue of America's primary system.