GRECO Evaluation – Familiar Problems and Very Useful Suggestions

Transparency – Serbia (official chapter of Transparency International) is of the opinion that GRECO properly recognized some of the problems in the fight against corruption. In the fourth round of evaluations, implemented as a mechanism of the Council of Europe GRECO (Group of States against Corruption), the focus was on the work of legislative bodies, the judiciary and conflicts of interest. Serbia received 13 recommendations on whose implementation, a report should be submitted by the end of next year. Implementation of these recommendations will certainly improve conditions, allowing for less exposure of the legislative and judiciary authorities to corruption. However, by our estimation, much more needs to be done for more tangible results. Parliamentarians need to exercise their authority when they supervise the executive and public prosecutors need to prosecute corruption cases without any fear and bias in pursuing cases.

None of the recommendations represent completely new innovation. On the contrary, if the deadlines from the Anticorruption Strategy had been respected, some of the recommendations, for example, regulation of lobbying and amendments to the Anti-corruption Agency Law to increase the authority of this organ and to establish more efficient control, would have been fulfilled a long time ago. It remains to be seen whether the introduction of this international element and the monitoring of its implementation will help authority organs in fulfilling the obligations they assigned to themselves.

A significant proportion of the recommendations is intended for the judiciary. Their goal is to increase the independence of the Supreme Judiciary Council and of the State Prosecutors’ Council, along with the promotion of their work. Transparency – Serbia believes that it is very important that GRECO evaluators tackled the problem of disrespecting the rules on public debates in the process of drafting regulations, which is related not only to the Parliament, but on a much higher level to executive as well. We also express our satisfaction with the fact that for the preparation of this report, GRECO has used materials that we prepared and presented to evaluators in a meeting held in the preparatory phase of this analysis.

Transparency – Serbia

Belgrade, 3 July 2015