The culminating instrument in multilateral anticorruption activity was – or may yet be -- the UN Convention against Corruption. Why “may yet be?” – because while it adopted FCPA-type principles and indeed went the FCPA one better in requiring member states to assist one another in returning assets looted by corrupt government officials, some of the UN Convention’s goals are more aspirational than mandatory (“shall adopt” too often becomes “shall consider adopting”) and because it lacks an enforcement mechanism: the convention is silent on whether violators should be fined or imprisoned. The significance of the UN treaty lies not so much in what it requires of its members than in the requirement itself, for now, for the first time in history, the international community has agreed to implement at the state level a mechanism to combat official corruption and return ill-gotten gains to the state from which they were looted. Is this or will this become “world law”?; the answer is yes. UN member states are now required to adopt national anticorruption laws and when most if not all have finally complied, the great majority of the world’s nation states will have implemented a multilateral instrument outlawing bribery of foreign government officials, a result which over time may well morph into jus cogens and thus become binding on those few states that did not implement the convention’s requirements.
Should you have issues pertaining to anticorruption laws you should contact the lawyer and law firm identified with the response from the particular country. You may also contact Maria de Sá Nogueira, the Chief Operations Officer of LEGALINK (mariasanogueira@legalink.ch) who will be happy to put you in touch with the appropriate LEGALINK member.
