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OAS ANTI-CORRUPTION MECHANISM ADOPTS REPORT ON PERU

At its Twenty First Meeting, held March 18 – 22, the Committee of Experts of the Follow-up Mechanism for the Implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption (MESICIC) adopted the Peru report on the implementation of this treaty in the framework of the Fourth Round of Review of the Mechanism. This is the fourth such report that has been issued by the MESICIC in relation to Peru’s implementation of this Convention.

In this Fourth Round of the Mechanism, the review focused on the structure, operation and results of the top four Peruvian bodies responsible for preventing, detecting, punishing and eradicating corruption: the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic; the Office of the Attorney General (Ministerio Público); the Judiciary (PJ); and the Anti-corruption Prosecutor’s Office. The progress made by Peru in relation to the recommendations of the First Round of the MESICIC were also reviewed.

The review was carried out taking into account Peru’s Response to the Questionnaire, information gathered by the Technical Secretariat, and, as a new and important source of information, the on-site visit conducted from September 25 to 27, 2012, by the members of the review subgroup for Peru, comprising The Bahamas and Colombia, with the support of the Technical Secretariat. During that visit, the information furnished by Peru was clarified and expanded and the opinions of civil society organizations, the private sector, professional associations, academics, and researchers on issues of relevance to the review were heard.

Some of the recommendations formulated to Peru for its consideration in connection with the aforementioned bodies are aimed toward objectives, such as the following:

With regard to the CGR, the objective is to strengthen it by ensuring that it has the human and financial resources necessary for the proper fulfillment of its functions, and by considering allocating the CGR a percentage of the national budget; and to conduct a systematic review of the State’s entire regulatory framework that limits strengthening the capacities of CGR and take steps to prevent the enactment of legislation that seeks to limit anticorruption oversight.

In connection with the analysis of the Office of the Attorney General, the objective is to establish Corporate Provincial Public Prosecutors’ Offices specializing in corruption offenses committed by officials in those judicial districts that do not already have one; to ensure that these important (existing and future) units specializing in the investigation, prosecution, and indictment of acts of corruption are endowed with the human and financial resources needed for them to fulfill their functions; and to review the impact of the new shorter procedural time limits established for preliminary investigations in the new Code of Criminal Procedure to determine if allowing more time would be necessary, especially for more complex corruption cases, and take appropriate action.

As for the Judiciary, the goal is to give due consideration to extending the prescription periods for corruption offenses, so as to prevent their perpetrators going unpunished; and to establish binding restrictive criteria, limiting judges’ authority to hand down suspended sentences for those convicted of acts of corruption.

As regards the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, the objective is to evaluate the current status of the cases for which the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office is responsible and consider taking legislative or other measures to determine what type of cases, based on their importance and/or seriousness, should fall within the sphere of competence of that Specialized Prosecutor's Office and which should be addressed by the institutional Public Prosecutors; to step up efforts by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office to increase actual recovery of reparation payments ordered by the courts, while making the regulatory and operational changes needed to fortify the Office as an institution and giving due consideration to legislative initiatives that support its work of recovering assets and property for the Treasury.

With regard to follow-up on the recommendations formulated to Peru in the First Round, three important advances were noted: 1) the promulgation and entry into force of Law No. 29542 (Law on the Protection of Whistleblowers in the Administrative Sphere and Effective Collaboration in Criminal Matters) and its enabling regulation; 2) the promulgation of Law No. 29785 (Law on the Right to Prior Consultation of Indigenous and Native Peoples); and 3) the adoption of the Open Government Action Plan (Ministerial Resolution No. 085-2012-PCM), which contains specific commitments with respect to transparency and access to public information.

At the same time, some of the recommendations formulated to Peru in the First Round that remain pending or were reformulated, address issues such as: 

  • Complementing the provisions on the contents of Sworn Statements of Income, Property, and Revenues of Government Officials and Civil Servants, in such a way that they include the express obligation of the declarants to include in those statements information regarding their “liabilities”; and developing this concept by indicating what items constitute liabilities and the information that needs to provided in relation to them;

  • Strengthening systems to insure that the CGR effectively verifies the contents of the Sworn Statements, by guaranteeing it access to any necessary sources of information and seeking, as far as possible, to ensure connectivity of the information contained in the databases kept by the various bodies, in order to enable the CGR to conduct swift and effective analysis of changes in the income and wealth of government officials;

  • Considering the establishment of a governing body to oversee access to information and to disseminate, supervise, and enforce full compliance with the Transparency and Access to Public Information Act, with authority to punish noncompliance and to resolve cases in which access to information is denied, without having to resort to the judiciary, as well as to guarantee that access to public information cannot be denied or restricted on grounds other than those determined by law or based on criteria other than those established by law.

In addition to the above, the report outlines the best practice on which Peru provided information, which refers, succinctly, to the “Young Auditors Program” of the CGR, which consists in students in their last years of secondary school conducting citizen surveillance activities. Accompanied by their teachers, they prepared, executed, and reported the results of “school children’s oversight” of their educational establishments, the Local Educational Management Unit (UGEL), the municipality, and the local police stations.

During this Twenty First Meeting, similar reports were adopted for Costa Rica, Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago and Honduras. The Peru report adopted by the Committee, as well as the aforementioned countries, are available at: http://www.oas.org/juridico/english/mesicic4_rep.htm


Edition N° 120 - March 2013

What is the MESICIC?

The Mechanism For Follow-up on the Implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption, known as MESICIC for its Spanish acronym, is a tool to support the development of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption through cooperation between States Parties.

Read more here


 

 

 

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