Spain remains at the same level as last year in perceptions of corruption, but falls one place in the world rankings. This emerges from the Corruption Perceptions Index, which has been criticized by the NGO that created it, Transparency International. The country has been losing positions among the best-rated countries for two years and is now defending the previous value (60 points out of 100), although it falls one place (from 35 to 36) and four places in the ranking of the 180 states analyzed Referring to the 2020 report, it falls behind Lithuania and Portugal, the two closest EU member states on the list, and is just one position above Botswana.
Transparency International denounces that a country needs “significant efforts” to improve its institutions, its laws and its judiciary in order to reverse the general downward trend described since 2020. And he explains that, in addition to the legal reforms, Spain must, in particular, improve the institutional functioning, with the renewal of the General Council of Justice, which is still in the country's debt for another year and which has been pending for four years. Members They have their expired mandate already doubled.
However, the recently published report, which however refers to the year 2023, not only points to the reform of the judicial body, but also advocates a reform of the Transparency Law, the Golden Visa or Golden Visas – which are granted – in order to reduce corruption in the public sector Large investors from outside the EU to stay in Spain, was introduced in 2013 as part of the Entrepreneurship Act, when the worst economic crisis in decades hit employment and growth figures – with the NGO already regretting last year that there was no central register of its owners .
The report urges Spain to rise again after so many years of decline, improve parliamentary transparency and create an independent authority to protect whistleblowers, whistleblowers who leak data that expose illegalities, a person punished by the EU and the country was incorporated into the national regulations with additions last February. He also understands and recalls that Spain lacks “impulse” to regulate mandatory registration of interest groups, a measure that it has already mentioned in its 2022 report.
Transparency highlights that Spain's mark fell by seven points between 2012 and 2018, with improvement only becoming known in spots in 2019. The current score, 60, is five points lower than in 2012. As detailed in the report: “It can only be said that a country's position improves significantly if it manages to consistently increase its score in successive years “And he warns that the country “should not be satisfied with its current position (…) among countries that were clearly far from its position two years ago, such as (…) Israel or Cape Verde.” Both countries now overtake Spain, which shares points with Latvia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Spain's result is part of an unprecedented average decline in a decade for countries in Western Europe and the European Union, which reach a score of 65 out of 100, although it is still the world region that achieves the highest marks in the index. Part of the decline is due to the worst result of Sweden (82), the Netherlands (79), Iceland (72) and the United Kingdom (71), which the NGO describes as the lowest since the study began in 1995 Result of 13 surveys and evaluations created by specialists, which were later standardized. Only six of the 31 countries in this group improve, compared to eight that receive a lower grade; The lowest score is 42 points for Víktor Orban's Hungary. The world region with the worst rating is Sub-Saharan Africa (33 points).
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However, several European countries occupy a good part of the top group, led by Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway and Singapore, states that can also demonstrate good functioning of their justice systems, and this is measured in another index by the same NGO. . In the last wagon are Somalia, Venezuela, Syria, South Sudan and Yemen, some of which are mired in armed conflict, a cause that Transparency International uses in part to explain its poor results. And to understand countries more generally, the report details that democratic countries generally tend to outperform authoritarian countries when it comes to fighting corruption. Among the former, those considered full democracies achieve an average score of 73 – 13 points higher than Spain – while failed democracies remain at 48 and undemocratic regimes only at 32.
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