Monitoring the EU accession process: corruption and anti-corruption policy

The report focuses on the prevalence of corruption in ten candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well as on the legal and institutional structures and policies with which governments are seeking to combat it. All Central and Eastern European candidate countries have made impressive progress towards establishing (or re-establishing) democracy, the rule of law and a market economy since the fall of communism. However, these countries have often inherited conditions conducive to the persistence of corruption, such as a tradition of entrenched mistrust of the State. They have also undertaken transitional tasks that are highly vulnerable to corruption, including the privatisation of their entire economies. The result is a situation in which candidate States continue to be troubled by relatively high levels of corruption. The report assesses that the EU accession process has on the whole had a major positive impact on candidate States' legal and institutional frameworks for fighting against corruption. However, the report also indicates that the EU's role in supporting candidates in their fight against corruption could be substantially more effective if tackled in a more coherent and consistent way. While the EU lacks a comprehensive anti-corruption framework or a mechanism for monitoring corruption, both of these have been created by the Council of Europe. The Council has developed a set of broad anti-corruption 'Guiding Principles', an active and functioning framework for monitoring adherence to the Principles - the Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) - and two anti-corruption conventions. The report recommends that the EU join GRECO so that both candidate and Member States are integrated into a functioning framework for monitoring corruption and anti-corruption policy.