OAS ANTI-CORRUPTION MECHANISM ADOPTS EL SALVADOR REPORT

At its Twentieth Meeting, held September 10 – 14, the Committee of Experts of the Follow-up Mechanism for the Implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption (MESICIC) adopted the El Salvador report on the implementation of this treaty in the context of the Fourth Round of Review of the Mechanism.

A significant portion of the report focused on examination of those oversight bodies in El Salvador with the responsibility for the prevention, detection, punishment and eradication of acts of corruption. Accordingly, the report examines the Office of the Attorney General, the Government Ethics Tribunal, the Supreme Court of Justice, and the Court of Accounts of the Republic. The progress made by El Salvador in relation to the recommendations of the First Round of the MESICIC was also reviewed. 

The examination was carried out taking into account El Salvador’s response to a questionnaire, information gathered by the Technical Secretariat, and, as a new and important source of information, an on-site visit conducted between March 20 and 23, 2012. This visit was carried out by a team comprising of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, as well as members of the MESICIC Technical Secretariat. During that visit, the review team met with representatives of government institutions as well with civil society organizations, the private sector and professional associations on issues of relevance to the fight against corruption.  

Some of the recommendations formulated to El Salvador for its consideration in relation to the foregoing oversight bodies address purposes such as the following:  

Provide to the Office of the Attorney General, the Government Ethics Tribunal and the Supreme Court of Justice with the financial and human resources to fully perform their attributions and functions.  

With regard to the Office of the Attorney General, establish objective criteria for assigning corruption cases and breakdown statistics with respect to punishing corrupt acts that trigger disciplinary; administrative, financial or civil; or criminal responsibility.   

Regarding the Government Ethics Tribunal, establish guidelines and a timeframe for the designation of the representatives to this Tribunal. 

Pertaining to the Supreme Court of Justice, restore to the Integrity Section of the Supreme Court of Justice the authority to request directly from banks and financial entities the account information of public servants and establish an accountability mechanism for the Court. 

With respect to the Court of Accounts, name its representative to the Government Ethics Tribunal as well as maintain statistics on the amount of money that has entered the public treasury as a result of the imposition of sanctions by the Court of Accounts; maintain statistics on the final outcome of citizens complaints received by the Court; and make all the Annual Reports of the Court of Accounts easily and readily available to the public on its website. 

In addition, the report considered as useful for the purposes combating corruption, the best practices currently applied by El Salvador, such as an initiative by the Subsecretariat of Transparency and Anti-Corruption of the Presidency that ensures citizen participation in public governance, known as “Accountability Mechanisms of the Executive Branch Agencies; and the entering of cooperation agreements between universities and the Government Ethics Tribunal, known as “Multiplier Agents of the Government Ethics Law.”

With regard to follow-up on the recommendations formulated to El Salvador in the First Round of this Mechanism, progress was made with respect to the enactment of the Access to Public Information Law, the reformation of the Government Ethics Law, and the establishment of the Economic and Social Council.  

Some of the recommendations still pending from the First Round or have been reformulated address issues such as: establishing mechanisms to detect possible conflicts of interest by public servants upon entry into the public service; creating mechanisms to protect the public interest when a conflict of interest arises; implementing a specific law that includes time frames and reasonable circumstances for demanding the periodic and updated submission of declarations of net worth; establishing a mechanism for the registration of assets, income and liabilities of public servants that are used to prevent and detect acts of corruption; eliminating from the Regulations to the Access to Public Information Law, ‘political security’ as a category of confidential information; the appointment of the Commissioners to the Institute of Access to Public Information; and the implementation of laws and mechanisms to encourage the participation of civil society and nongovernmental organizations in efforts to prevent corruption. 

During this Twentieth Meeting, similar reports were adopted for Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico and Paraguay. The El Salvador report adopted by the Committee, as well as the aforementioned countries, are available at:  http://www.oas.org/juridico/english/mesicic4_rep.htm