Corruption in employment is still the most common

Banja Luka, 20. March 2012 – During 2011 the Advocacy and Legal Advice Centre of Transparency International Bosnia and Herzegovina  (TI BiH) received 1097 calls through an open free line for reporting the cases of corruption (0800 55555), as well as by post or electronically. Based on these reports, TI BiH has initiated 197 cases towards various institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, seeking to secure citizen rights, and to point on individual cases of corruption.

Comparing the different sectors, the largest number of complaints was related to irregularities in the field of public administration (17%), followed by judiciary (13%), property rights (8%), the field of civil engineering and urban planning (7%) and a large number of complaints (11%) relates to the denial of access to information by public institutions.

Analyzing the nature of cases in these areas, it is evident that most complaints, both in government sector and in other sectors, were related to the employment process, where citizens commonly reported irregularly conducted vacancies for civil servants at all levels of government and also irregular appointments for various functions. This practice escalated in cases of nepotism at the highest levels of government and an open distribution of the most responsible positions in institutions through inter-party agreements, which suggest that nepotism and clientelism are key mechanisms for advancement and the most common way to obtain a position in BiH institutions.

When it comes to judiciary, citizens are most commonly complaining about long processes at courts, but here there were also reports related to corruption in judiciary, and to violation of procedures by judges. On the other hand, TI BiH also received 6 files related to the prosecutors’ offices, mostly complaining that the prosecutor’s offices did not react upon citizens’ reports.

Based on the above mentioned repots, TI BiH acted towards relevant institutions on various levels of government in BiH. However, the prosecution of corruption cases is on a very unsatisfactory level in BiH, and more importantly judiciary is sometimes clearly ignoring corruption cases, while there are increasing pressures on the work of judiciary, which was also shown through the initiative to abolish judiciary institutions at the state level.

On the other hand, public institutions refuse to undertake measures for determining responsibility in their own ranks, and a further obstacle is the slow administration, as well as the trend of ignoring or disrespecting verdicts, even by state institutions. For this reason citizens need sometimes to wait several years in order to see epilogues of their cases.

An encouraging fact is that citizens are more and more willing to report corruption, and that among these reports the number of whistleblowers or persons who reported irregularities in the institutions in which they are themselves employed, is increasing steadily. However, there still remains a lack of mechanisms to protect whistleblowers, which discourages citizens to report corruption, as they fear for possible consequences. At the same time, another encouraging fact is the increased interest of media for corruption, where journalists often turn to TI BiH for legal advice in the field of free access of information. Through this collaboration, TI BiH, in cooperation with the media, managed to obtain and publish very important documents and contracts related to the expenditure of public funds and public – private partnership, which certainly helps in strengthening the oversight of the government.

TI BiH hopes that this practice will continue in the future and once again calls upon all who were witnesses or victims of corruption to report any irregularities to institutions or through the free line 0800 55555.