Like all international treaties, the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) is a product of its time. Its particular time - the past 10 years or so - is one in which everyone is ready to say that corruption is wrong but no one is fully prepared to fight it. And so the convention has gone through a series of ups and downs, packing a genuinely comprehensive set of anti-corruption concepts into a framework that does not truly oblige anyone to implement them. While the standards suggested by the breadth and depth of the convention appeared high at first, successive negotiations seem designed to steadily wear them down.
This month, the signatories to the convention met in Qatar (a location surely not chosen for its symbolic value) to determine how they should review each others' implementation of the convention. Such review was required by the original convention, a concept highly praised by anti-corruption advocates. In honor of the latest meeting the latter put forth their usual recommendation: that review should take place both by a country's peers (since this supposedly generates equality and more official confidence in the results) and by independent reviewers in the form of civil society. But such a scenario was never realistic. Instead the signatory governments devised a watered-down review system in which civil society participation is optional.
The truth is, most of these governments indeed have something to hide. Convention signatories include many governments widely understood as corrupt, such as Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, and Zimbabwe. These countries knew that signing the convention would enhance their international image and hopefully their foreign aid receipts, and they took a gamble that the repercussions would not be any greater than having the opportunity to stand in the company of serious corruption fighters. So far they have turned out to be right.
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