Global Integrity: Serbia removed from 2009 Grand Corruption Watch List

U.S. non-government organization Global Integrity, which tracks governance and corruption trends in 35 countries worldwide, removed Serbia from its 2009 Grand Corruption Watch List.

The Grand Corruption Watch List identifies countries where the lack of effective conflicts of interest regulations, unregulated flows of money into the political process, and poor oversight over large state-owned enterprises combine to pose a systemic risk of large-scale theft of public resources.

According to Global Integrity, a recent amendment to strengthen the current law requiring the disclosure of donations to individual political candidates in the Official Gazette, will help the public to better understand who is backing particular candidates for public office by transferring the monitoring of political party financing to the Anti-Corruption Agency.

As Global Integrity explains in its statement, rather than measure perceptions of corruption, the report assesses more than 300 “Integrity Indicators” and includes journalistic pieces covering corruption cases.

A new study of government accountability in Serbia has found that political influence is strong in law enforcement appointments in Serbia, as the Minister of Interior personally appoints or dismisses the chiefs of the regional police administration.

Global Integrity is of the opinion that some progress has been made in the regulatory area with the adoption of the Law on Communal Police in 2009, but that there is still a long way to go in decentralizing decision-making and raising confidence of citizens in the police.

One noticeable decline in the country’s data since Global Integrity's 2008 assessment of Serbia has been in the area of rule of law, where there have been significant delays in the enforcement of court decisions brought about by a bloated court management system and uneven workloads of courts and judges.

Ministarstvo unutrašnjih poslova Republike Srbije

NGO Global integrity

Law on funding political parties

Law on Communal Police