Since retiring in 1984, Le Hien Duc, a Vietnamese school-teacher, has become a resourceful anti-corruption fighter by filing complaints and helping fellow citizens to challenge petty bribing and large-scale graft.

Her respect for authority ends where corruption begins. Duc has tracked down high and low-level officials through different means, at home or in the office, to ensure that they cannot ignore the victims of corruption claiming their rights.

In spite of many threats, she provides hope and encouragement for stopping acceptance of corruption. Warning of an early death has been delivered to her door in the form of an empty coffin but this 75 year-old is full of anti-corruption energy.

Whether it is allegations of graft in the school system or bribing by police on the road, Duc does not back off until the concerns of those afflicted by corruption are dealt with in a fair manner.

Mark Pieth, a criminal law and criminology professor at the University of Basel in his native Switzerland, has provided outstanding leadership in fighting corruption on an international scale. Prof. Pieth has countered corruption not only as a co-founder of the Basel Institute on Governance but as chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery in International Business Transactions and as a member of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme of the United Nations.

His willingness to publicly criticise governments that fail to implement the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and those that did not to provide enough support to identify companies that paid kickbacks in the oil-for-food scandal, is admirable.

Powerful governments have tried to stop his criticism and he has withstood attempts to oust him from the OECD’s anti-bribery group. Prof. Pieth has stood his ground and never stopped being outspoken about the need to implement the anti-bribery rules that countries have committed to. Ensuring that foreign bribery, money laundering and other related activities of the corrupt are stopped, has been a core priority of Prof. Pieth for over 19 years.