31/10/2013 – Georgia has achieved significant progress in reducing corruption over the past decade. To build on this progress, the Government should focus on strengthening its professional civil service and ensure independence of the judiciary, according to a new OECD report.
To further strengthen Georgia’s capacity to combat corruption, the report calls on Georgia to:
- Reform civil service regulations and measures to avoid political influence on civil servants and to ensure their professionalism, neutrality and impartiality;
- Ensure independence of the judiciary and strengthen autonomy of prosecution in corruption cases;
- Enforce liability of legal persons for corruption and promote business integrity programmes for the private sector;
- Reinforce the Anti-Corruption Council and its secretariat to ensure effective revision and implementation of the Anti-Corruption Strategy and Action Plan in a meaningful dialogue with civil society;
- Reform legislation on access to information and establish an independent oversight body for this legislation.
The report also highlights positive aspects of Georgia’s efforts to fight corruption. For instance, Georgian legislation has mostly been aligned with international standards. Georgia was the first IAP country to introduce liability of legal persons for corruption in 2006. The report also highlight’s Georgia’s on-line system for asset declarations for public officials, which provides public access to the officials’ declarations; reform of Georgia’s procurement legislation; and steps taken to align Georgian political financing legislation with the European standards.
The full report on Georgia is available here in English, and here in Russian.
The IAP is an initiative launched in 2003 to support anti-corruption reform efforts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, as part of the OECD Working Group on Bribery outreach work under its regional initiative Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
For further information, journalists should contact Mrs Olga Savran at the OECD’s Anti-Corruption Division at (33) 1 45 24 13 81 or [email protected]
