A New Counter-Corruption Strategy is Approved

On April 14, 2010, the RF President has signed a Decree “On the National Strategy for counteraction of Corruption and the National Anti-Corruption Plan for 2010-2011”1. The Decree has approved the National Strategy for Counter-Corruption in the Medium Term, as well as the Proposed New Edition of the National Plan to Combat Corruption.

 

As the purpose of the National Strategy, there is identified "the elimination of the incentives and conditions, provoking corruption in the Russian society". To do this, it is planned to solve the following tasks:

а) development of the legislative and institutional framework for combating corruption, relevant to the needs of time;
б) organization and adherence to legislative acts and management decisions in the field of combating corruption, creating the conditions that prevent the possibility of corrupt behavior and ensure the corruption level reduction;
в) enforcement of the society anti-corruption behavior standards, including the use of appropriate enforcement measures in accordance with the laws of the Russian Federation.

Areas of combating corruption identified in the Strategy can be grouped into several categories:

  • "in-house" ones, allowing more strict control over the discipline of public servants and the development of corporate standards. This type of measures is perhaps the most simple and accessible in terms of their practical implementation. To date, the ministries and public agencies have already gained some experience in the control over public servants, the establishment of Committees on compliance with the requirements of official conduct of civil servants, etc. In this regard, the practical implementation strategies is likely to go in line with the way of improving the existing practices;
  • involvement of "civil society" in the process of combating corruption and improvement of legal awareness of citizens. Among such measures, one can specify: expansion of the system of legal education of the population, ensuring the participation of civil society agencies in combating corruption, etc. This group of trends is too general in nature, and therefore their practical implementation may be difficult. Firstly, Russian civil society is insufficiently developed to effectively control the institutions of government power, and secondly, the mechanisms of practical implementation of such measures are unclear. For example, it is not very clear what are the levers that can provide incentives to the population to abandon the attempts to participate in corruption in the situation of the lack of certain benefits provided by the government and local authorities (for example, places in kindergartens, high-quality schools, free medicines);
  • enhancement of existing legislation. This group of measures is, perhaps, of the greatest interest from the standpoint of the legal system. Among them, the strategy identifies such trends as: improvement of the accounting system of the state property and its utilization assessment; enhancement of conditions, procedures and mechanisms for national and municipal procurement, strengthening of judicial decisions effectiveness, development of institutional and legal frameworks for monitoring enforcement.


Practical implementation of the above-mentioned trends is quite complicated from a technical point of view. Thus, in the Russian Federation the practice is still underdeveloped for the adopted anti-corruption expertise of legal acts, although in 2009-2010 a significant work has been done in this direction2. It appears that these measures aimed at reducing corruption risks as such may be the most effective.

A.V. Kireeva – PhD, Head of Laboratory examination and normative-legal acts development

  1 See http://news.kremlin.ru/ref_notes/518. 
  2 Thus, there were adopted: the Federal Law of 17.07.2009 No. 172-FZ “On anti-corruption expertise of the legal acts and draft laws and regulations”, as well as the RF Government Decree of 26.02.2010 No. 1996 “On anti-corruption expertise of legal acts and draft laws”, which contained the rules for anti-corruption expertise of legal acts and draft legal regulations, as well as the methods of its implementation.