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New Report Published: Comparative Overview of the Corruption Circumstances in the Region

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On 13 and 14 November 2014, in Tirana, Albania, the annual conference of the Southeast European Leadership for Development and Integrity (SELDI) was held. The Conference was dedicated to the good governing and the anticorruption challenges in the region. The findings and recommendations from tracking corruption and anticorruption in Southeast Europe were discussed during the first day. The second day was dedicated to corruption prevention through corruption risk assessment. The Conference was organized in cooperation with the Regional Anticorruption Initiative (RAI), the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) and the Albanian Ministry of Local Affairs. 
 
The Regional Report on Corruption Assessment in Southeast Europe, providing a comparative overview of the conditions in the region was also published. The findings from the national reports on corruption assessment were also presented, while the cooperation between the civil society and the state institutions for the sake of creating and conducting effective anticorruption policies was especially accentuated.  
 
 
Borjan Gjuzelov from MCIC in his speech presented the main findings from the Macedonian Corruption Assessment Report. He pointed out that due to the great socio-economic problems, the Macedonian citizens do not recognize corruption as one of the three main social problems. The findings from the research also show that the Macedonian citizens recognize corruption more as an institutional problem of an inefficient administration and lack of law enforcement, than as a cultural problem or traditional behavior. The derived indexes show that the acceptance of corruption increased, together with the corruptive pressure, while the susceptibility, the spreading and the profitability of corruption decreased.
 
Gjuzelov pointed out that Macedonia like the other countries in the region has a relatively solid legal frame, which is still insufficiently and selectively implemented. Hence, the need for boosting the political will with the aim of institutional prosecution of higher-level corruption cases, as well as the need for building the trust between the citizens and the institutions was emphasized. The need for more specific defining of the anticorruption policies, with the aim of their effective enforcement in reality was also accentuated. The need for strong and competitive civil society as an important corrector of the institutions was also confirmed. 
 
In the final discussion, the participants pointed out that the civil sector should not only be a corrector of the institutions, but a useful source of expertise and knowledge. In that direction, many examples of cooperation between the civil sector and the state, as well as the good practices of Serbia, Romania and Albania were presented. 
 
Furthermore, many mechanisms and international experiences for corruption risk assessment were discussed. The methodology for anticorruption risk assessment of the laws, developed by RAI and RCC, aiming to establish additional international standards for better laws development with minimal corruptive risk was also presented. 
 
The Conference is part of the project “Civil Society for Good Governing and Anticorruption in Southeast Europe: Building Monitoring Capacities, Lobbying and Raising of Public Awareness”, financed by the European Commission, Enlargement Directorate-General. 17 civil organizations from nine states in the region are included in the project (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey). The implementing organization of the project is the Bulgarian Center for the Study of the Democracy (CSD), while the Macedonian partners in this project apart from MCIC are the Institute for Democracy “Societas Civilis” – Skopje and the Institute for Economic Strategy and International Affairs Ohrid

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