Germany
Germany
Corruption Perceptions Index 2008: 7.9 (14th out of 180 countries) Conventions Council of Europe Civil Law Convention on Corruption (signed November 1999; not yet ratified) Council of Europe Criminal Law Convention on Corruption (signed January 1999; not yet ratified) OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (ratified September 1998) UN Convention against Corruption (signed December 2003; not yet ratified) UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (signed December 2000; ratified September 2005)
Legal and institutional changes ● The new Law on the Status of Civil Servants, adopted on 17 June 2008,1 implements a whistleblower protection provision as per article 9 of the Council of Europe Civil Law Convention on Corruption.2 Section 38 (2) of the law provides that officials now have the right to report suspicions of corruption directly to the competent law enforcement authorities without previously informing their superiors. GRECO, the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption monitoring body, recommended twice in the past that disciplinary measures should not apply to an official who directly reports a grounded suspicion of corruption to the police or prosecutors.3
● In December 2007 the Bundestag (federal parliament) adopted the Law on Reform of the Interception of Communications. The new article 100a of the Criminal Procedure Code allows communications to be intercepted in cases of active and passive bribery of public officials as well as serious bribery offences in the private sector. This step was also recommended by GRECO.4 ● The federal government introduced a bill in October 2007 to implement the provisions of the UN Convention against Corruption, the Council of Europe Criminal Law Convention on Corruption, the Additional Protocol to the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption and the EU Council Framework Decision on Combating Corruption in the Private Sector.5
1 See www.bgblportal.de/BGBL/bgbl1f/bgbl108s1010.pdf. 2 Council of Europe Treaty Series no. 174. 3 GRECO, First Evaluation Round: Evaluation Report on Germany (Strasbourg: GRECO, 2002); Second Evaluation Round: Evaluation Report on Germany (Strasbourg: GRECO, 2005). 4 GRECO, 2002. 5 Bundestags-Drucksache 16/6558.
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