The killing of 43 student teachers in Mexico has alerted the world to the country’s deteriorating human rights record. While the US and EU governments have expressed concern, others – including the UK…
Qatar and Russia have been cleared of corruption in their successful World Cup bids.
EPA/Walter Bieri
FIFA appears to have cleared Russia and Qatar of any wrongdoing in their successful bids to host the 2018 and 2022 world cups. Its report recognises that mistakes were made but downplays the level of improper…
Yes I definitely do want a receipt for this transaction.
Andrew Matthews/PA Wire
Regulators in the UK and US are fining five high street banks for attempting to manipulate foreign exchange rates. Together they have been told to pay £2 billion in compensation following a year-long investigation…
Joyce Banda, who was forced to fire her entire cabinet for corruption.
DFID via Flickr
Like many aid-dependent countries in the developing world, Malawi cannot balance its books without donor support, which makes up as much as 40% of the national budget. Yet because of the ongoing nightmare…
The word Ebola is conjuring up fear around the world; breakdowns in Western infection control procedures have led to cases in Spain and the US, and have given the non-African world a taste – or a foretaste…
The latest batch of data on political party membership in Great Britain do not make happy reading for the faithful. Membership of the major parties is at a historic low, with less than 1% of the electorate…
“Who do you trust?” has become a common mantra in Australian politics. Our political leaders should do much more to stop the answer being “no one”.
AAP Image/Julian Smith
A fundamental lack of trust is at the heart of Australian politicians’ extremely poor reputation. It is the main reason why people’s opinions about their elected representatives have mutated from healthy…
‘Won’t this show up in the crime stats?’
Nomad_Soul
Corruption is an urgent global problem, one that costs the developing world dearly and badly slows its development down. But until recently, figuring out just how big the problem is, and what to do about…
GlakoSmithKline (GSK) is currenlty feeling the heat from the allegations of foreign corruption that have erupted in China, Poland, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon and the company is scrambling to restore…
The tiger, felled: Zhou Yongkang.
EPA/Anindito Mukherjee
Chinese premier Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption purge has really started to hit its stride – and by announcing an investigation into Zhou Yongkang, one of the most influential figures in the Chinese Communist…
Nigeria and Algeria both fell out of the World Cup at the last 16 stage, competing heroically against France and Germany and showing amazing discipline and shape for 70 of the 90 minutes. Then tiredness…
G20 countries - including Australia - could improve their whistleblower protections.
Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com
The G20 countries’ whistleblower protection laws fail to meet best international standards, according to the first independent evaluation of both public and private sector whistleblowing laws. This is…
FIFA, led by president Sepp Blatter, is under fire once more for its decision to award hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup to the Gulf nation of Qatar.
EPA/Atef Safadi
Qatar did not win the right to host football’s World Cup in 2022 legitimately. That was impossible. Awarding the World Cup to Qatar was clearly not about passion for the game, nor about offering communities…
It is not known whether Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, has ever digested any of Karl Marx’s work. If he has, then he will no doubt be well aware that history has a tendency to repeat itself first…
Ostensibly, the May 22 coup was just the latest instalment in Thailand’s decade-long political conflict. On one side are the forces loyal to tycoon-turned-politician Thaksin Shinawatra: some business elites…
Qatari football fans celebrate … but for how much longer?
Manaf Kamil
Reports in the Sunday Times that improper secretive payments of millions of pounds were allegedly made to officials supporting Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup have led to calls for the Gulf state to…
“A public servant who accepts bribes is akin to a traitor,” Judge David Rozen read as he sentenced Ehud Olmert, Israel’s ex-prime minister, to six years in prison for corruption. But in real democracies…
NSW premier Barry O'Farrell felt obliged to resign as a result of ICAC revelations when it wasn’t clear to all that he should.
Daniel Munoz/AAP
“Monitory democracy” refers to the extra-parliamentary, para-legal, post-bureaucratic institutions of scrutiny that emerged as recently as the 1970s in Australia. Their evolution has swept us along in…
Attorney-general Jarrod Bleijie and premier Campbell Newman are defying the lessons from other states and from Queensland’s own history of corruption.
AAP/Dave Hunt
The old joke was that visitors to Queensland should turn their clock back one hour and their calendar back 30 years. There are indications state premier Campbell Newman wants to take Queensland back to…
A ‘national ICAC’, which the Greens recently proposed in response to the revelations in NSW, would be fraught with difficulties if implemented.
AAP/Lukas Coch
The corruption scandals facing New South Wales politics are about as complex as they come. The sheer number of investigations, seemingly involving a conveyer belt of familiar faces, have made the question…