• August 7, 2021
• By L'Orient Today

Lamia Mounbayed Bissat- This year on June 2-4, the UN General Assembly held its first ever Special Session against Corruption, UNGASS 2021.The UNGASS was supposed to adopt a strong political declaration recognizing grand corruption as a serious global challenge, stressing that impunity cannot continue and that enforcement measures are needed to help societies achieve
justice. Two months earlier, nearly a hundred NGOs and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on UN member states to adopt such a declaration and create an intergovernmental working group “to develop technical proposals for new frameworks and mechanisms that would address weaknesses in the current international legal framework and infrastructure”; however, the proposal was not included in the final political declaration, which, as Transparency International pointed out, is largely a reminder of the obligations already stipulated in the UN Convention Against Corruption of 2003. This missed opportunity is particularly worrying, especially for countries where corruption remains a national scourge, such as Lebanon (which ranks 149th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index).
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