Transparency International finds that Estonia hasn’t paid enough attention to fulfilling OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention, writes aripaev.ee.

In 2006 and 2007 not a single case of international bribery was looked into in Estonia. According to the report, Estonia doesn’t even have laws to fight international bribery. Transparency International, which evaluates the level of corruption in 180 states since 2001, finds that Estonia should define the terms foreign official, giving a bribe, and enterprise liability better, once the appropriate changes to the Penal Code have reached the parliament.

Even though Estonia doesn’t have a special authority to look into corruption cases, TI finds the co-operation of other authorities satisfactory.

Transparency International deems the possibility to notify of corruption in Estonia satisfactory as well, as a special e-mail has been created for anticorruption, where one can notify of such offences. Even though separately, the system to protect the witnesses of corruption crimes isn’t effective.

In 1997, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) approved Anti-Bribery Convention, which is used to fight bribery and corruption in international enterprises. This is OECD’s fourth report after the convention was approved, where the data of 34 states was compared.

In 1997, approving OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention signified an important step in fighting corruption. As most international enterprises operate in OECD countries, it was considered the key to overthrow dangerous bribery cases in democratic enterprises, development programmes, and business.

From the report of 2008, it turns out that 16 states have reinforced the convention, which means two more states then the year before. However, if others, who don’t pay attention to the convention now, won’t focus on following it, others might stop seeing the point of it. Transparency International thinks that the conventions should be looked over to give it more influence.