Ethics commissions and experts are multiplying without corruption being really tackled. With the deepening of the European Union, however, the problem has become massive. According to lawyer William Bourdon, it is crucial for democracy to implement more dissuasive sanctions, to penalize behavior that perverts political institutions and the public space.
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What is the great lesson of the revolts which led the Arab peoples to break the chains of despotism? ? Corruption is a cancer for the rule of law, democracy and development. When it comes to development, corruption is more of a source of impoverishment in poor countries than in rich countries. But it remains a poison that can mithridatize the republic at any moment. It is first of all a factor in the privatization of public space. It clearly aggravates the already historically significant loss of trust in France and Europe between citizens and those responsible for embodying the public good and the general interest. It pushes those who are its actors to violate the separation of powers. Because when we corrupt or when we take advantage of our position to enrich ourselves, we have only one obsession: to organize our impunity. Necessarily, we make Montesquieu turn in his grave: we despise the judges, we bypass them – as has been done for several years in a caricatured manner under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. Corruption in all its forms is an extreme danger for democracy and ultimately it aggravates the problems of social cohesion, even though this is an absolutely essential catalyst for national unity and solidarity.
To face this cancer, it is essential to turn our gaze towards Europe. We must not lose sight of the requirements to prevent conflicts of interest and to legislate at the national level, but at the European level this question will arise in an increasingly serious manner. For what ? Firstly because the decisions taken increasingly impact the lives of more than 300 million people. There is a generation of lobbyists who understand this well: they have invested in Brussels and are fully aware that we must try to delay, complicate, obstruct any public decision-making process on financial regulation or criminal law. of the environment. However, there are no preventive control mechanisms which are indexed and proportional to the importance of the public decision likely to be taken in Brussels. People are in a conflict of interest situation ; this is the subject of controversy and rumors in the corridors of the European institutions ; but this is not enough: one day we will have to open this major project in the fight against corruption on a European scale.
An example: the European agency which is responsible for participating in the very complicated process of marketing authorization of medicines – God knows if that is important today. We know that this agency is run by people close to pharmaceutical groups. If there are no reporting obligations backed by a risk of criminal sanction for those who participate in the public decision-making process relating to the marketing of medicines in Europe, we are in fact leaving the way open to pharmaceutical laboratories who have developed the most powerful capacity to influence public decisions on the planet. European citizens will have to get involved in this project.
However, the new rules that have been introduced in France are a small step forward, extremely cautious and timid, not at all up to what our democracy requires. The ethics officers at the level of the National Assembly, whatever their good will, have completely insufficient means: recommendations and controls look good on paper, the institution is sympathetic, but falls under the rump institution, the alibi institution. He should be given the opportunity to take the matter to the prosecution by initiating investigations. But even if she had more powers, it wouldn’t be enough. Ethics and anti-corruption charters exist everywhere in companies across the country. CAC 40: that didn’t prevent scandals. These control institutions can sometimes even serve to cover the perpetuation of a certain number of fraudulent behaviors.
Above all, the effectiveness of the measures depends on the elected officials themselves. However, for the moment they do not really have a reporting obligation. They fill out their declarations on plain paper, putting in more or less what their moral conscience dictates, without any real control or risk of criminal sanction. The essential point is there: we can make all the elected officials on the planet say what we want. We can tell them “ describe in this or that declaration, if you have interests in this company, what is your assets ? “. As soon as lies, showmanship or duplicity pay off, there will always be people who are not necessarily big thugs who will only play the game half-heartedly and this will have serious consequences on future public decisions. contributing to the loss of citizen confidence in public affairs. So we need heavy and dissuasive criminal sanctions. There is a report which went unnoticed two years ago and which explains that the environment at European level is not dissuasive because the large polluting industries have incorporated into their financial strategy the cost that can result from fines to which they would be condemned. It’s the same thing for elected officials: the sanctions must be truly dissuasive so that there is a real constraint exerted on them, a constraint of truth, probity, integrity: that’s it. what citizens expect.
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