The Netherlands, Canada and Ecuador want a global anti-corruption court

The Netherlands, Canada and Ecuador want to put an end to the “kleptocrats”. To do this, these three countries supported Monday calls for the creation of a global anti-corruption court.

The foreign ministers of the three countries have indeed backed a campaign for such a tribunal, which, according to its supporters, would operate in the same way as the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Two trillion dollars lost each year

This “tribunal will provide the international community with an additional tool to enforce existing anti-corruption laws,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra tweeted after meeting in The Hague, a Dutch city home to a multitude of global tribunals. Some two trillion dollars in procurement spending worldwide is lost to corruption every year, according to UN figures.

Senior US Judge Mark Wolf, who is leading the campaign, said the court “will focus on the most senior officials and the people they bribe”. “The culture of eliminating corruption starts at the top,” he said during a panel discussion on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting.

Collect the words of “whistleblowers”

Some 189 parties, including 181 countries, have signed the UN Convention against Corruption, aiming to end the practice worldwide. “However, kleptocrats enjoy impunity because they control the administration of justice in the countries they rule,” denounced Mark Wolf. “This court could be a place where very courageous whistleblowers could, for example, provide their evidence” if they cannot do so in the countries where they live.

However, supporters of the tribunal admitted that there is still a long way to go before it becomes a reality, and that it would face similar challenges to those faced by the ICC. This court, created in 2002 to judge the worst atrocities committed in the world, for example does not have the capacity to arrest suspects and relies on its member states to do so, with varying success. “We want to look at what has worked and what hasn’t worked and what the next steps might be,” Maja Groff, senior treaty adviser for Integrity Initiatives International, an NGO, told the roundtable. behind the call for the creation of the anti-corruption tribunal.

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