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Making Local Government Transparent in Eastern Europe: Anti-Corruption Workshop in Riga C orruption has become a formidable impediment to the transformation and improvement of living standards in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The international anti-corruption movement has focused on corruption at the international and national levels. But as subnational levels of government have gained power and responsibilities, local-level corruption has come to have a growing impact on the lives of citizens in transition economies.Municipal government—and the integrity or lack of integrity of that government—has an important effect on people’s everyday lives. Ideally, local governments should be more responsive to the needs, requests, and demands of individuals or groups than the central government. The local level is thus the ideal environment for civil society to mobilize to help improve government services and increase integrity in government; as the smaller size of communities can yield greater cooperation among principal actors. During a two-day workshop sponsored by the Open Society Institute and Transparency International in early November, participants from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine met with professionals from well-known international organizations to focus on how to combat corruption at the municipal level in Eastern Europe. The workshop represented an "East-East" exchange of ideas, information, and approaches toward fighting corruption. Workshop participants came out with the joint Riga Declaration, laying out the major criteria of local government transparency in Eastern Europe. The principal aim of the Riga workshop and the subsequent declaration was to develop a model for a local integrity system akin to the National Integrity System developed by Transparency International. To that end, participants agreed to the following pillars of integrity: · Political will for change is a necessary component of any comprehensive integrity system. It is necessary to build coalitions of well-respected, reform-minded, exemplary top managers and mayors and use them to introduce and publicize innovative anti-corruption practices.· Participation by civil society is vital to any anti-corruption program. The importance of civil society groups working directly with local authorities—helping to write codes of conduct, for example—cannot be overestimated. The business community is equally crucial in maintaining high business standards, creating ethical business associations, and training businesses on how to deal properly with government representatives.· An active, independent media can serve as a watchdog and can report on reform successes. For this to happen, appropriate standards must exist for investigative journalism, and freedom of information acts and a system of legal protection for journalists must be established.· Fighting corruption in the civil service through civil service reform can be facilitated by writing and enforcing codes of conduct and conflict of interest guidelines, establishing performance measures, setting higher selection standards, providing better training, making salaries public, forcing disclosure of assets, and focusing on the quality rather than the number of civil service members.· To enforce anti-corruption measures, local governments need a clean, professional judiciary; laws permitting the prosecution of bribe givers as well as bribe takers; an Office of the Ombudsman; accessible legal advice; telephone hotlines for the expression of ideas; and effective institutions and adequate funding to investigate and prosecute cases of corruption.· Transparent financial institutions and oversight organizations are critical. Key tools include independent auditing institutions, independent audits by internationally recognized organizations, transparent public procurement, budgets, privatization processes, public hearings, public participation in decisionmaking, and the guaranteed financial autonomy of local governments with respect to higher tiers of government.· Viable, self-sufficient local government units in the countries involved in the workshop require administrative-territorial reform. Key steps that need to be taken in the areas of legislative and regulatory reform include contracting service provision to private businesses and NGOs, privatizing publicly owned businesses, giving a strong role to independent lawyers in providing advice and drafting legislation, informing citizens of their rights, closing legal loopholes, and lifting some of the immunity afforded deputies, government officials, and judges.The participants at the Riga workshop believed that this model offers a better guide to reforming local institutions in their countries than Transparency International’s national model, as it is slightly more descriptive. Although it remains to be seen whether this model can serve as an effective subnational model, its simple nature lends itself to use in various contexts.
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