55 - Corruption and a New Instrument of World Order
The war in Ukraine, the civil wars in Africa, the ceaseless flow of migrants from the South to the North, and the thieving of resources from peoples everywhere (not only in Russia) persuaded a gathering of distinguished global leaders over the weekend that an International Anti-Corruption Court needs urgently to be established as an important instrument of world order.
The proposed new court would focus on the thefts of kleptocrats, most often leaders of nations like Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe, but also on Russia, Belarus, and other authoritarian enterprises that are often in business specifically to steal from their national treasuries and their citizens.
Petty corruption – being extorted by bureaucrats for payments to produce birth certificates, marriage licenses, driving permits, and the like – is a major problem for the world’s poorest citizens, especially across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So is the common practice of police at borders or at rural and city roadblocks to demand payment to avoid supposed violations of this or that part of a vehicle code.
But scholars of corruption know that fish rots from the head. Petty corruption is enabled farther up the authority tree, often by heads of state and their minions. Corruption would be less of a problem in Russia, for example, if Putin were honest and regarded as honest by his subjects and his soldiers. It is this corruption of supreme leadership that the establishment of an International Anti-Corruption Court is meant to combat.
When Robert Gabriel Mugabe was president of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2017, he and his close associates appropriated untold millions from state coffers, from alluvial diamond mines, from an invasion of the then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, so as to grab revenues from copper, cobalt, and cadmium mines, from the insistence that Zimbabwean taxes pay for the war while Mugabe and his cronies benefited from metal sales, and from pay for play contracts. That was grand corruption, and it continues under Zimbabwe’s current President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was a facilitator and enforcer for Mugabe in the bad old days.
Likewise, when Judge Sergio Moro began unraveling the Lava Jato pay for play scandal in Brazil in 2014 and after, he discovered that hundreds of politicians had been on the take, benefiting from the skimming of construction contracts organized by Petrobas, Brazil’s state-owned petroleum company, and Odebrecht, South America’s largest and wealthiest construction firm. Billions of dollars were involved, with Brazil’s people and its tax base suffering.
In Africa and Asia corruption literally kills, as it does in the Ukrainian war. It kills by depriving poor countries of resources with which to educate and minister to the health needs to its peoples. Grand corruption greatly distorts budgetary and other priorities and helps to maintain poverty and the instruments of impoverishment across all sectors of society.
Grand corruption, for the same reasons, drives emigration out of Africa, Asia, and Latin America toward Europe and the United States. Why else besides escaping from war and seeking economic opportunity would so many millions flee their countries, risking lives and everything else, for more fortunate (and less corrupt) shores? No Syrians flee to Russia, which is corrupt. They brave open seas and many other dangers on land to realize better lives in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, or Britain. Likewise, Hondurans and Salvadorans head for the border with the United States because immiseration and corruption surround them and hinder them at home.
These are very unhappy times, especially with the strengthening of grand corruption and kleptocracy across the globe. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranks 180 countries, with Nordic exemplars, New Zealand, Singapore, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada, and others at the top – the least corrupt end of the spectrum. (The US was 27th most recently.) The last 100 or so countries on the list are all seriously infected with grand corruption. Somalia, Venezuela, South Sudan, and a host of other African and some Asian countries fall to the very bottom (most corrupt) on this list.
The rulers -- the kleptocrats – of many of those lamentable cases of grand corruption are the targets of the proposed new court. Ideally, its investigators would be able to assist domestic courts in following the money and bringing such peculators to justice. Or signatories to the court could pursue the monies that kleptocrats have laundered and deposited in places like Switzerland, Cyprus, British Caribbean dependencies, and the American states of Delaware, Nevada, and South Dakota. Those who aid and abet the kleptocrats could be targets, too.
Civil societies in grandly corrupted states could also recommend investigations and potential prosecutions of the leaders of their corrupted nations to the new court. It would then pursue kleptocrats and impose the kinds of sanctions which could separate larcenists from their illicit proceeds.
The details of the Court have yet to be developed fully. There are definitional questions that require further fine tuning, precise jurisdictional issues in need of elaboration, and decisions to be made about exactly how the court could apply forfeiture rules and grab the ill-gotten gains of kleptocrats in order to re-purpose them, repatriate them, or in part to help finance the court.
Many of these issues are being addressed shortly in international meetings to be held in Austria, and possibly elsewhere across the globe. But a signal of increasing momentum in favor of the proposed court is the backing of the Netherlands and Canadian ministries of foreign and global affairs, the support of Ecuador, the endorsement of forty-two former heads of state belonging to the Club of Madrid, and the recent favoring of the idea by the newly elected president of Timor-Leste (East Timor). He is a former Nobel Peace Prize winner; a further thirty-two Nobel laureates have signed a declaration in favor of such a court.
The creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court is hardly going to strike fear into the breasts of Putin or his generals, kleptocrats all. Nor is it likely to deter today’s current crop of kleptocrats from continuing to steal from their people from Cambodia to Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, Chad, Uganda, Guinea, Nigeria, and Venezuela. But it is designed, once operational, to deter by its very existence, by its threats of prosecution and pursuit of hidden assets, and by its moral authority to make the world ‘s peoples less beset by the loss to kleptocratic individuals of their patrimonies.