EU ANTI-CORRUPTION REQUIREMENTS: MEASURING PROGRESS IN ALBANIA, KOSOVO, FYR MACEDONIA AND TURKEY

Over the years, the EU has developed clear membership requirements for countries desiring to enter the Union. Today these requirements also include meeting certain standards in the areas of anti-corruption and good governance. Although the candidate and potential candidate countries are required to ‘make progress’ in these areas, so far there have been no clear standardised baselines that would allow their progress (or regress) to be monitored.

In this regard, Transparency International has developed the Comparative Indicator-based Monitoring of Anti-corruption Progress initiative (CIMAP), based on EU governance and anti-corruption membership requirements, as well as general good practice standards in the field. The initiative has been designed together with four partner countries – Albania, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia and Turkey – and assessed three national institutions in these countries: the judiciary, legislature and public administration (the civil service).

The findings reflect the current situation in each country and provide a baseline and guide for advancing anti-corruption efforts that are consistent with EU requirements and international good practice.

While the legal and regulatory frameworks are often in place, implementation of anti-corruption laws and sanctioning of non-compliance is lacking across all four countries. Low capacity and weak governance in the judiciary, legislature and public administration help to explain this gap between law and practice in each country.

Common problems that exist across the countries include:

• Low and inconsistent levels of access to information
• Ineffective application of asset disclosure requirements
• Absent or unimplemented codes of conduct
• Political interference in institutional responsibilities and operations
• Poor working conditions for judges, legislative staff and civil servants

The research methodology for the CIMAP initiative has been developed in a way which allows tracking and monitoring changes over time in the institutions and countries included in the report. It is hoped that the study will be conducted annually in candidate the potential candidate countries to continually monitor progress.

Transparency International Albania, Albania

Kosova Democratic Institute (KDI),Kosovo

Transparency Zero Corruption Macedonia, FYR Macedonia

Şeffaflık Derneği, Turkey

• The report has revealed cross-cutting problematic issues among the participant countries, despite the differences in their institutional set-up
• In regard to the legal context, the area of public administration has the highest scores, while legislature proved to be the weakest area
• Standing out was the inadequacy between the existing legal frameworks (to address corruption risks) and their implementation in practice
• Institutional capacity is heavily undermined by the prevalence of poor working conditions and the frequent political interference
• Other areas of great concern include access to information, the existence and use of codes of conduct and asset disclosure policies
• These shortfalls being common to all the four countries suggests that institutional deficits are related to the lack of political will in regard to the reform implementation

The full results for both countries and institutions are available in the format of research notebooks.

Read the report:

EU Anti-Corruption Requirements: Measuring Progress in Albania, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Turkey

Read an overview of indicators here

Research notebooks (in English):

National Reports (English)

National Reports (national languages)