Moscow News
www.mnweekly.ru/
February 21, 2008
Getting Tough on Corruption
By Elizabeth Swanson
Recent official statements are giving Russians the clearest signals yet that battling corruption will be a top priority in the next several years.
"We will definitely introduce anti-corruption laws," President Vladimir Putin said during his Kremlin press conference last week. This echoed an unexpectedly outspoken statement from Dmitri Medevedev last month: "Russia is a country of legal nihilism at the level... that no European country can boast of," he said. "Corruption in the official structures has a huge scale and the fight against it should be a national program."
The Moscow News asked Maxim Prokhorov, the deputy chairman of the board of the Association of Lawyers of Russia, on some of the more effective measures against corruption - going beyond legislation and proposals to raise officials' salaries.
"It is necessary to complement the measures that the government is taking against corruption with social involvement and control. Here the Association of Lawyers acts as an institution of civil society," he said.
The Association was created in December 2005 with President Vladimir Putin present at the ceremony. Medvedev, a member of the Association, spoke before other members at a recent meeting in January.
"Together with the state we are involved in a preventive fight against corruption," Prokhorov said. "This is, mainly, expertise in legislation. The Association has 20 commissions, including a commission against corruption. It is headed by the chairman of the State Duma Security Committee. But our activity is not limited to legislation. This is legal education of the public, and creating anti-corruption information centers."
Indeed, it is education and information that can benefit society most in this sphere, officials say. So far, reports on corruption in Russia appearing in Western media sometimes portray it as growing statistically. But there is a lot more to the problem than statistics.
"Because the situation with corruption can't be expressed in specific numbers, it's better to look at the way society perceives corruption," deputy chairman of the State Duma Security Council Mikhail Grishankov told RIA Novosti this month. Meanwhile, even independent analysts admit that reports like those from Transparency International can be misleading. "In 2005, Transparency International all of a sudden brought Russia more than 30 spots down," Indem President Georgy Satarov said. "Clearly, this did not result from some instant rise in the level of corruption in Russia but from the breach of that barrier between a rosy-colored model of reality and reality itself."
Prokhorov, meanwhile, echoes other officials who call for a more complex approach. "We shouldn't dramatize the situation in Russia too much. The problem of corruption and ‘legal nihilism' is a tragedy not just for our country. Russia has ratified international conventions - the UN Convention Against Corruption and the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption of the Council of Europe which impose high standards of effective work in this sphere. It has become a member of the Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO). In order to comply with these agreements, lawyers and legislators in our country have completed a lot of work in bringing new changes to the Criminal and Criminal Procedural Codes in Russia, and a federal law is also in the works."
Given how closely linked the problem is to the mindset, it's not just legislation but education that's crucial.
"We believe it's very important to talk about corruption in specialized legal publications and in the media," says Prokhorov. "The regional vector is particularly important. One of our main missions in the regions is opening free legal consultation centers for the public. We see information and propaganda of anti-corruption behavior as the main levers of improving the situation."