COLOMBIA TO HOST SECOND OAS HEMISPHERIC ANTICORRUPTION CONFERENCE

The city of Cali, Colombia, is to be the venue for the “Second Conference on the Progress and Challenges in Hemispheric Cooperation against Corruption,” organized by the Department of Legal Cooperation of the OAS Secretariat for Legal Affairs, with the support of the Colombian government, through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Presidential Program for Modernization, Efficiency, Transparency, and Anticorruption.

This international Conference is a part of the cooperation program that the OAS General Secretariat has been carrying out over recent years to facilitate exchanges of information and experiences on the topics reviewed within the framework of the Mechanism for Follow-up on Implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption (MESICIC), which currently comprises of 31 OAS Member States.

The Inter-American Convention against Corruption, a pioneering instrument in this area, contains important provisions for preventing, detecting, and eradicating corrupt practices, which have served as the basis by the MESICIC Committee of Experts for formulating specific recommendations to its States Parties, in order to improve their legal and institutional instruments for tackling corruption and strengthen inter-American cooperation in pursuit of greater effectiveness in this undertaking.

The Conference, which is to take place on June 23 and 24 of this year, will include dialogue and discussion panels with international experts on the following topics: the effective protection of whistleblowers of acts of corruption; the implementation of systems for filing statements of net worth and interests; the promotion of civil society participation in the fight against corruption; the strengthening of private sector responsibility in those endeavors; and quality management and training as tools for the prevention of this serious problem.

The program for the event and an information bulletin is available at the Anticorruption Portal of the Americas.

What is the MESICIC?

The Mechanism For Follow-up on the Implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption, known as MESICIC for its Spanish acronym, is a tool to support the development of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption through cooperation between States Parties.

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