The European future of the Western Balkans: Thessaloniki@10

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The European future of the Western Balkans: Thessaloniki@10 (2003-2013)
public scrutiny and the society’s capacity for monitoring its own government. The
European Commission and Council both noticed that problems affecting freedom
of expression and the media remain a particular concern but except for monitoring
developments no real remedies have been found. These might include encouraging
local governments to support the new media, which are less prone to capture by
vested interests, and invest in developing the media’s capacity to play the role of
good governance watchdog.
The following factors seem to make less significant statistical impact:
• Party funding restrictions.
In Europe, leaving aside the countries which fund parties
exclusively from the national budget, the more restrictions a country has on
party funding, the more corrupt it seems to be according to regression analysis. It
may be because these countries adopted restrictions in recent years to fight political
corruption, but the evidence also shows that countries which have achieved good
control of corruption have managed it with different party funding arrangements.
In short, the only existing statistical evidence available so far shows that transparency
of sources of party funding has some deterrent effect on political corruption. It
is more useful to constrain the capacity of political parties to favour companies with
public contracts, which are easy to monitor, than to be continually endeavouring to
improve party funding legislation, where more restrictions frequently result in more
illegal or intricately arranged transfers. If parties cannot deliver to their sponsors,
the latter will freeze the money themselves.
• Existence of a dedicated anticorruption agency.
Countries in Europe with special
prosecuting anticorruption agencies do not perform significantly better than countries
which deal with corruption through their normal judiciary. In other words,
if the judiciary is independent from government, corruption can be controlled
through normal prosecution procedures and the law courts (prosecutors can in any
case undergo specialised training in this field). If the judiciary is not independent,
then an ‘autonomous’ anticorruption agency risks becoming a target for political
control, as has already occurred in Slovenia, Latvia or Romania. However, the EC
has taken the line that corruption can be controlled through these special agencies,
despite evidence that agencies alone cannot cope with the problem if all other policy
factors are not addressed. The result is a situation as in Romania in 2009-2012 when
corruption worsened while the anticorruption agency performed better and better
and received high praise in EU reports.
Existence of a Judicial Council
• . Neither globally nor in Europe is the existence of
a Judicial Council entrusted with the self-regulation of magistrates associated with