EU Accession, as a conditional process, enables TI to advocate for and work with governments on adoption and implementation of anti-corruption legislation necessary to qualify for membership. In EU candidate countries, TI National Chapters play an active role in monitoring progress towards membership in the anti-corruption sector, through contributing to the EU’s annual reports on progress towards membership and drafting and campaigning for anti-corruption laws.

TI National Chapters have contributed to monitoring governments’ anti-corruption policies at the request of the Open Society Institute (OSI) and European Commission. The results were published in the OSI’s widely distributed report, Monitoring the EU Accession Process: Corruption and Anti-Corruption Policy. This programme also attempts to respond to the key lessons learned about the anti-corruption sector during the first Eastern Enlargement.

Transparency International has worked to combat corruption in the Balkans since the late nineties, including implementing three large programmes in the region,

• Strengthening Civil Society’s Capacity to Combat Corruption in South Eastern Europe funded by the German Development Ministry,
• Western Balkan Accountability Programme, funded by Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres Programme, funded by the German Foreign Ministry and the European Commission.

Results of these programmes include: foundation and strengthening of anti-corruption NGOs, advocating for and drafting anti-corruption reforms, raising public and media awareness of corruption issues, establishment of Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres where citizens can receive legal advice on corruption-related problems.

Transparency Through Awareness (TTA) project, May 2005-2006

The Transparency Through Awareness (TTA) project is designed to support TI’\s Priority focus on Transparency in EU accession and advocacy. The TI-Secretariat is coordinating the implementation of the TTA project with National Chapters and contact groups in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. The TTA project was funded in part by the European Commission (DG Enlargement) and ran for a period of 12 months, beginning in May 2005.

The project aims to increase understanding of the purpose, distribution, and use of EU structural funds in two main ways. First, it creates an enabling environment for those who wish to and/or are able to influence the transparency of the use of EU structural funds. This will involve general awareness raising within the population. Second, the project will work to provide more targeted and specific information and skills to those groups most able to affect positive change. Specifically, the TTA project will generate research which could be easily transferred for use in a workshop on the transparency of EU funds.

The Commission has just released a Green Paper proposing greater transparency in the use of EU funds. The focus is on the 80% of the community budget which is managed by the Member States and currently not at all transparent. While the names of recipients of the 20% of funds managed by the Commission are subject to public scrutiny, it is not compulsory for member states to make public the recipients of nationally managed funds. TI strongly supports disclosure of these data, but sees it as a first step to a wider reform of the management