Inter American Anti-Corruption Convention strengthened by member states

During the Third Meeting of the Conference of States Parties (CoSP) on the Mechanism for Follow-Up on the Implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption (MESICIC), the Organization of American States (OAS) made progress in strengthening MESICIC. It approved the implementation of country visits as part of the evaluation process and increased the countries signed up to the monitoring mechanism.

Transparency International (TI) welcomes the States Parties and the Technical Secretariat of the Mechanism for taking such an important step. These visits are seen as the most reliable means of obtaining first hand information from different sectors and assessing whether implementation is appropriate, helping the dissemination of the Convention across different government authorities and NGOs, and promoting cooperation between states in this area.

With respect to this, the Conference of States Parties recommended that the Expert Committee, with the support of the MESICIC´s Secretariat, would develop and adopt a methodology for carrying out these visits in accordance with Article 33 of the Rules of Procedure of the Committee. The CoSP also stressed the urgency of the situation, maintaining that the visits should be initiated in the Fourth Round of MESICIC which starts in 2011.

"This decision marks an important step in assessing the efforts of the countries not only in implementing the Convention, but in the fight against corruption more broadly. Now it is important that during the visits a wide range of stakeholders are consulted, including those from civil society," says Alejandro Salas, regional director for the Americas at TI.

TI also welcomes the moves by Haiti, Saint Kitts and Saint Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda for their adoption of the compliance review mechanism of the Convention. Now the number of countries subject to MESICIC is 31.