Corruption often violates our human rights, like the right to equality before the law or the right not to be subject to torture. That’s why the Raoul Wallenberg Institute attended the 18th International Anti-Corruption Conference this week with a clear message: Any work to combat corruption must include human rights approaches. Read our new report on the subject.
After the three-day event, we sat down with our four experts to get their key takeaways
Conference participants came to discuss not only the problems caused by corruption but also ways to be make anti-corruption more effective. There was genuine interest in human rights approaches to anti-corruption, and that opens opportunities for future collaboration, which is exactly what we advocate for in our report, says Elaine Ryan, Senior Analyst on Anti-Corruption and Human Rights.
The human rights based approach can contribute to creating a clearer understanding of who the victims of corruption are and the substance of the violation. It adds a clearer picture of which rights the persons conducting corrupt acts violates and thereby make them stand out in public as perpetrators of human rights violations, says Morten Kjaerum, Director.
There was a lot of discussion about the threat to democracy that might possibly result from the fight against corruption. To me that only reinforced the need for more studies like ours and the need to further cooperate with the anti-corruption community. Human rights can strengthen anti-corruption not only through well-developed expertise, but also by offering the possibility to rethink the rhetoric into a more human, empowering, inclusive, and rights-based discourse. That can be extremely relevant in countering the rise of populism, cynicism and distrust in democratic institutions, Isis Sartori Reis,
Junior Programme Officer.
Human rights has a major role to play in the fight against corruption and there is now a momentum for closer cooperation with the human rights and anti-corruption communities that we have to build on, says Mikael Johansson, Senior Policy Adviser, Anti-Corruption and Human Rights.