Transparency International recommends sting operations to combat corruption

  • 2005-09-07
  • By Milda Seputyte
VILNIUS - Transparency International and the Human Rights Monitoring Institute concluded that staging bribery situations for the purpose of testing an officer's integrity was an appropriate 's and even recommended 's method to battle corruption, especially in countries such as Lithuania.


"Transparency International highly recommends putting into practice the so called 'honesty tests,'" director of Transparency International headquarters in Lithuania, Rytis Juozapavicius, told journalists.

"For instance, an officer detains an undercover drug dealer who offers a bribe. If the officer is tempted 's in the meantime all their actions are filmed and monitored by witnesses 's then he fails the test but doesn't become a corrupt officer," he explained.

Juozapavicius said that such methods were launched among New York police in 1994 and yielded positive results. When using this bribery scenario, an officer who fails the test is fired but isn't prosecuted for taking the bribe.

"This is also a great opportunity to check how grounded appeals from community members are about a particular officer. Some 1,500 New York officers out of a police force of 40,000 are tested this way annually. A similar program has also been successful with London police," Juozapavicius added.

Human rights experts seconded the notion of sting operations. The Human Rights Monitoring Institute in Vilnius concluded that if an officer is suspended from his position for participating in a bribe, it is not a violation of human rights.

"This anti-corruption tool 's testing officers through bribe temptations 's wouldn't violate an officer's rights, nor the presumption of innocence if the results are not used in a criminal trial as evidence," Kestutis Cilinskas, a lawyer at the institute, told the Elta news agency.

It's widely believed that many people enlist themselves as customs officers or traffic officers for the sole purposes of "collecting extras." Therefore, experts agree that staging bribes could test their career goals.

"An individual may choose not to work for the service if he's afraid of the staged bribes. But if he agreed to work for such services, he also agreed to a test of honesty. So this isn't a violation of human rights," Cilinskas said.

The Parliamentary anti-corruption committee first suggested implementing these operations in July. Committee Chairman Petras Baguska said that such a system could help fight corruption and would create unfavorable conditions for this phenomenon.

He explained that similar "behavioral checks" have been successfully executed in countries such as Britain, Canada, Australia, Belgium and the U.S.A. for 20 years.

But not everyone agreed. Parliamentary Chairman Artur-as Paulauskas, a former prosecutor, said the idea was "a strange proposal" since Lithuanian law prohibits provoking criminal offense.

He said he did not believe such ideas should be considered seriously.

MP Algirdas Sadeckas reacted even more emotionally after the proposal was announced, calling it the "meanest possible provocation."

"The fight against corruption is repeatedly transformed into speeches, proposals and copying from other countries' legal norms. I believe the best prevention is when the law is applied to bribe takers," Sadeckas said.

According to Transparency International's corruption map of Lithuania, road traffic, customs and vehicular inspectors were among the most frequently mentioned law enforcement officers who take money under the table. A survey conducted last year showed that company leaders were most often solicited and most willing to pay traffic police bribes, while such bribes were most "helpful" at customs. The problem is also rampant in national hospitals and vehicular inspection centers.