Transparency Serbia: No Political Will in Serbia To Fight Corruption 

Nemanja Nenadic (BETAPHOTO/MEDIA CENTER BELGRADE)

In Serbia, there was no political will to curb corruption, as the government had been ignoring laws on public procurement, passing special laws enabling million-dollar projects of importance to the regime, and lacking strategies, with all that pushing it away from the rule of law, Transparency Serbia (TS) said while presenting the latest corruption perception report at a news conference in Belgrade on Jan. 30. 

TS Program Director Nemanja Nenadic stressed that Serbia’s ranking by corruption perception index (CPI) had hit its lowest in the past 12 year, noting though that it was less of the problem than the nonfunctioning of anticorruption mechanisms. “CPI and the answer to ‘what the chances are of any public official being held accountable for corruption’ are correlated. In countries where the chances are believed to be small, corruption perception is higher,” Nenadic specified. 

He said that curbing corruption was not a priority of the state, which had not had a national strategy in place for more than five years. Nenadic stressed that the government had been openly disregarding anticorruption regulations, citing the obvious examples of executives in public companies who had been for way too long acting rather than serving in their position, and the adoption of a special law for a project worth billions such as EXPO 2027.  

Professor Radmila Vasic said that it could be concluded that corruption levels had increased in countries seeing democratic backsliding, wherein the major reason was the lack of respect for the rule of law, which is contained in the Constitution. She added that the regime had no political will to change laws, noting that now it was demonstrating what it could with this new EXPO 2027 law, which would open many opportunities for even more corruptive acts.