The Cohort for Anticorruption policies as a guarantee for national security, stability and sovereignty was established to build an informal alliance between States with comparable problems by identifying challenges and overviewing the approaches to overcome them across five topics relating to national anticorruption policies. The Cohort was officially launched at a kick-off event on 19 January 2023, which discussed anticorruption policy solutions in the framework of the S4D process and Year of Action. The discussion featured key commitments and concrete actions to improve democratic resilience and priority areas for action including the establishment of a zero-tolerance environment to administrative corruption; countering strategic corruption as a tool for foreign authoritarian influence; and enhancement of the institutional and legal responses leading to effective investigation and punishment.

Anticorruption policies are important for building resilient democracies, as the transition from a state-owned economy to a market economy created opportunities for oligarchs to capture massive amounts of wealth and power. These illicit networks of power still continue to wield much influence on politics and economics, contributing to instability and threatening national sovereignty. A cohort engaging the countries of Central and Southeast Europe with their public institutions and CSOs has great potential to re-establish the societal trust and understanding necessary for resilient democracies.

The expected outcomes from this cohort are: to make a joint statement at the second Summit; develop a system of alert for identified cases of corruption or attempts coming from abroad to corrupt state officials; create a better environment for common investigations and preventive actions; and organise sustainable communication channels and cooperation mechanisms between relevant institutions and non-state actors.

To achieve their objective and desired outcomes, the cohort in November 2022 established a list of participating states and non-state actors. Thematic meetings of officials, professionals, NGO’s and opinion makers for identification of best practices were organised in January and February 2023. A plenary meeting/conference will be held in March 2023 to adopt a Joint Statement to be presented to the next Summit for Democracy.

Relevant documents released by the cohort can be found in the links on the righthand side of the page, and any public events are listed below. We invite you to use the contact form on this portal if you have any contributions or corrections regarding this cohort. Find out more about participation by the Basel Institute in anti-corruption Cohort efforts here and see a video statement on action against corruption by the Cohort here.

Co leads

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  Bulgaria

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  Basel Institute

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  Center for the Study of Democracy

Documents

• Kick-off Event Agenda
• Cohort Concept Note
• Policy Forum Agenda
• Policy Forum Workshop Agenda