The Council of Europe's anti-corruption group (GRECO) today published its Sixth Interim Compliance Report concerning transparency of party funding in Denmark. Despite some progress made since the evaluation report published in 2010, GRECO is rather disappointed overall by the limited results achieved after so many years.
GRECO welcomes that the Danish authorities introduced a ban on donations from anonymous donors, but is concerned that the ban only applies for donations to political parties and lists of candidates and not for individual candidates. The high threshold applied (currently some € 2,700) below which anonymous donations would be acceptable is also a critical concern in terms of transparency.
GRECO is pleased that a clear obligation has been included in the law to audit parties which participate in national and/or European elections by an independent auditor. That said, specific guidelines concerning political parties are still missing and it is regrettable that an overall independent monitoring mechanism is still not in place to supervise political financing of parties and election campaigns, as required by European standards. GRECO is of the view that, for example, the State Audit would appear appropriate to carry out such a function.
Denmark has dealt in a satisfactory manner with six of fourteen recommendations since the 2010 Evaluation Report. While this allowed Denmark to exit the non-compliance procedure, GRECO has requested the Danish authorities to provide a report regarding further actions taken to implement the pending recommendations by 31 December 2018.
