(The Hague) The Netherlands, Canada and Ecuador backed calls on Monday for the creation of a global anti-corruption court, saying it would help tackle “kleptocrats” at the helm of governments.
The foreign ministers of the three countries have backed a campaign for an anti-corruption tribunal, which its supporters say would operate similarly to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“Such a tribunal will provide the international community with an additional tool to enforce existing anti-corruption laws,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra tweeted after meeting in The Hague, a Dutch city home to a multitude of global tribunals.
Some two trillion dollars in procurement spending worldwide is lost to corruption every year, according to UN figures.
Senior US Judge Mark Wolf, who is leading the campaign, said the court “will focus on the most senior officials and the people they bribe”.
“The culture of eliminating corruption starts at the top,” he said during a panel discussion on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting.
Some 189 parties, including 181 countries, have signed the UN Convention against Corruption, aimed at ending corruption around the world.
“Yet kleptocrats enjoy impunity because they control the administration of justice in the countries they rule,” Wolf said.
“This court could be a place where very courageous whistleblowers could, for example, give their evidence” if they cannot do so in the countries where they live, he added.
But supporters of the tribunal admitted that there is still a long way to go before it becomes a reality, and that it would face challenges similar to those faced by the ICC.
The ICC, created in 2002 to try the worst atrocities committed in the world, for example, does not have the capacity to arrest suspects and relies on its member states to do so, with varying success.
“We want to look at what has worked and what hasn’t worked and what the next steps might be,” said Maja Groff, senior treaty advisor for Integrity Initiatives International, an NGO at the panel, at the panel. origin of the call for the creation of the anti-corruption court.