A general chapter summarising the main findings, describing corruption-related trends across the EU, and analysing how Member States deal with corruption in public procurement.
28 Country chapters providing a snapshot of the situation regarding corruption, identifying issues that deserve further attention, and highlighting good practices which might inspire others.
The Report also includes the results of two Eurobarometer surveys on the perception of corruption amongst European citizens on the one hand and companies on the other.
European officials are in discussion with the IMF, the World Bank and other major financial bodies on ways of helping the ex-Soviet republic should it decide to sign the free-trade agreement with the EU after all.
Putin had threatened to respond to such a deal with economic sanctions against Ukraine, which has huge debts and unpaid gas bills outstanding with Moscow. Ukraine’s ultimate decision could be decisive to Putin’s Eurasian Union plan.
Putin’s comments made clear his continued designs on Ukraine and that “by hook or by crook” he will seek to try and drag it into the so-called Eurasian Union, his long-cherished idea “of reincarnating some semblance of the Soviet Union,” said Boris Tarasyuk, Ukraine’s ex-foreign minister.
The agreement could have clinched a tumultuous shift by the strategic former Soviet republic in the past decade toward embracing Western economic and political values. Mr. Yanukovych’s sudden decision to turn his back on the deal late last month infuriated the nation’s opposition parties and sent millions of pro-Western, pro-democracy demonstrators into the streets of Kiev.
Ukrainians today find themselves in a bind between alliance with the developing pseudo-democratic, post-Soviet, Putinist state developing in Russia, or radiating from Moscow as much of Russia has been left to suffer as well, and their humanist drift toward the compassionate and inclusive values of the open democracies of the European Union.
Stefan Meister, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr Putin had lost room for political maneourve as he entered his presidential third term since 2000. “He has isolated himself from the proactive part of society and the elite,” he said. “He has surrounded himself with hardliners from the security service who promote Russia’s “modernisation” through the country’s military-industrial complex.”
“The EU offers a token package, which is not of any interest to the Ukrainian government,” Alexei Pushkov, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Russia’s Parliament, told CNN’s Hala Gorani, who was sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.
“That’s why Mister Yanukovych has initially rejected it,” he said. “Then all these demonstrations started with the participation of the European ministers…who were speaking on the Maidan [Kiev’s Independence Square], joining the protesters, and so on.”
No state in the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence needs reminding who has the energy supply plus a massive and vulgar army (presented in the video at the base of this post and represented by memories of its appearance in Georgia a few years ago).
In Russia, power hasn’t to do with the liberation of independent spirits and the productive energies of a people: as with its superficially mirror opposite in Islam’s mix of military and theocratic dictatorships, “political power” refers to absolute control.
In essence, the causes and the talk may be wildly different, but similar personalities construct their societies in response to their own internal needs.
Putin’s claim to moral superiority as regards the west would seem well demonstrated by Russia’s continuing and supportive relationships with both the Bashar Assad’s bomb-happy reign of terror in Syria and Ayatollah Khamenei’s iron grip (not to mention about $90 billion in personal accumulation) on Iran. Those three plus President Kadyrov would seem to be “in it” — the money, at least — together.
As much may be known to educated and web-enabled and still recently politically liberated Ukrainians who have taken to the streets braving bone-chilling cold and potentially bone-breaking state paramilitary to make their views count.
A day after a face-to-face meeting with President George W. Bush in Beijing who expressed ‘grave concern’, Mr Putin accused the U.S. of siding with Georgia by ferrying Georgian troops from Iraq to the battle zone.
‘It is a shame that some of our partners are not helping us but, essentially, are hindering us,’ said Mr Putin. ‘The very scale of this cynicism is astonishing.’
They have frequently shifted the boundary south of the previously accepted course – Mr Makhachashvili says Russian troops around Dvani were using maps dated 1921 – in effect grabbing hectares of extra land.
Moscow has said South Ossetian authorities were merely demarcating its true boundary, using Soviet-era maps.
I propose a new approach, a simple extension of an existing mechanism: the infringement action. The Commission could signal systematic complaints against a Member State by bundling a group of individual infringement actions together under the banner of Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) which guarantees:
the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity, and equality between women and men prevail.
A systematic infringement action would share with ordinary infringement actions specific complaints against the national law or consistent practices of a Member State for violating particular provisions of EU law.
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and University Center for Human Values, as well as Director, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Princeton University.
The paper would seem to address a slew of issues sensitive now in central and eastern European states slipping along with resurgent medieval to Nazi-era nationalist movements. Certainly, returns to anti-Roma and anti-Semitic incitement would obviate the “rights of persons belonging to minorities.”
In the post-WWII generations, one would have hoped that so much bigotry, license, and hate had been consigned to historic memory and the coffin lid on that pounded sufficiently to keep it closed forever.
The realpolitik, as Hungary’s Jobbik might exemplify, would seem not quite so.
As the direct memory of such monsters fade with the dying of the “Greatest Generation”, it has been left to the children and grandchildren to detect the same poisonous blood in contemporary bodies politic and keep it from seeping back to the surface and — as it may do so, however slowly — drowning again another generation to come.
Scheppele’s proposal goes on to deal more directly with Hungary’s “democratic backsliding” toward fascism, as with this example:
The structural weakness of the individual infringement action was illustrated by the creative, bold, important, and successful case that the Commission brought with regard to the decapitation of the leadership of the judiciary that the Hungarian government accomplished through the sudden, forced early retirement of senior judges. By lowering the retirement age from 70 to 62 with immediate effect, the Hungarian government forced the departure of the most senior 10% of the judiciary, including fully one quarter of the Supreme Court justices and half of the appeals court presidents. The government then replaced these senior judges with judges of its own choosing, using a new legal procedure that put the choice of such judges into the hands of the president of a new political institution, the National Judicial Office, taking that power away from the judiciary itself. (pp.3-4).
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Szaniszló’s harangue begins with a rehash of the Kennedy assassination, a topic he talked about earlier. Here the story serves as an introduction to the main theme. Kennedy was assassinated by “financial powers that conquered the United States.” According to Szaniszló, Kennedy was not the first victim of this financial power group because “there were earlier presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries” who were killed by these people. I myself couldn’t come up with any president whose assassination was in any way connected to the financial world. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a Southerner; James Garfield’s assassin was mentally unbalanced; and William McKinley was killed by an anarchist. As for vice presidents, no vice president of the United States has ever been assassinated. And as for secretaries, there was an assassination attempt on the life of William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, at the same time as the president’s assassination, but he survived.
Soon enough Szaniszló moves to more dangerous grounds. With a quick turn we are at 9/11, which is according to him “the biggest lie of world history” because it was a “willful self-provocation, one of many.”
Ferenc Szaniszló hosts a twice-weekly news show in Hungary on “Echo TV”. Says Wikipedia (as viewed 12/2/2013) about him: “One of Echo TV’s better known broadcasters is Ferenc Szaniszló, known for his racist and anti-Semitic statements.[9][10][11][12][13][5] In 2011, Hungary’s media regulator fined Echo 500,000 Forints after Szaniszló compared Roma people to “monkeys”.[14]
Nice guy.
Such as Szanisló may represent should have a country, preferably one where they may be left by themselves. Until that day, other more genuinely democratic and open societies may need in their region-wide transnational law some astute, defensive, and enforceable legal guidance and law.
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