The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe held a webinar bringing together representatives of the Congress and Tunisian institutions and experts for an exchange of findings and good practices in the area of preventing corruption at local level. Co-operation between the Congress and Tunisia is essential to assess and implement practical measures to support decentralisation, increase citizen participation and train elected representatives to prevent corruption at local level by tackling its causes.
The health crisis is compounding the worldwide systemic crisis, placing an enormous strain on trust in politicians. This makes it all the more crucial to build up citizens’ trust in their local and regional representatives, who are in the front line where it comes to managing matters such as social services, the building sector and planning. According to Andreas Kiefer, Secretary General ad interim of the Congress, in this context “the Congress’s expertise, which is founded on the experience of 150 000 local and regional authorities in Greater Europe, could help Tunisia to consolidate its policies in this sphere”. This webinar, which was held by the Congress as part of the project on “Promoting local governance in Tunisia” with the support of Liechtenstein, Norway and Spain, provided a forum for exchange between representatives of the Congress and Tunisian associations and institutions and experts on means of honing the way in which the Congress might contribute to Tunisia’s efforts to prevent corruption at local level.
European expertise at the service of Tunisia’s local elected representatives
The Council of Europe has already instigated work on the Tunisian Constitution of 2014, which insists on the values of transparency, accountability, impartiality and integrity. Having been a partner for local democracy with the Congress under the South-Med Partnership since 2017, Tunisia was assisted by the Congress when adopting its Code on Local Authorities in 2018. As stated by Imed Boukhris, the head of Tunisia’s anti-corruption agency (INLUCC), the Code is an enhanced legal framework which, among other things, establishes the right of citizens to access information. The Congress Spokesperson on promoting public ethics and preventing corruption at local and regional levels, Andrew Dawson (United Kingdom, CRE/ECR), pointed out that the question of preventing corruption arose every day everywhere in Europe, including in his own municipality in the United Kingdom. He stressed how important it was to pool experience and presented the practical guides published by the Congress in 2016 in the form of six thematic reports in the collection “Public Ethics”. These guides, which had been translated into Arabic and made available to Tunisian local elected representatives, were already used by local elected representatives in Europe to help them to apply the principles of good governance, namely accountability, transparency, integrity, respect and non-discrimination, merit and impartiality, in their daily work.
In his talk, Andrew Dawson, focused on the notion of open government, which implied greater participation by citizens in the political process at local level. The goal was also to make it easier for citizens to hold their representatives to account on the basis of reliable information, made available to all, particularly through the digitisation and on-line provision of data. In this connection, the European Code of Conduct for all Persons Involved in Local and Regional Governance, adopted by the Congress in 2018, could also be used by Tunisia, although there was also a need to extend it to all private-sector providers of public services, whose numbers had grown in recent years.
The growing number of stakeholders involved in public procurement procedures is one of the root causes of corruption, as was pointed out by Ms Amelie Tarchys Ingre (Sweden, ILDG), rapporteur on transparency of public procurement, in a report adopted by the Congress in 2017. Every year corruption in the award of public contracts swallows up €5 billion in the European Union, striking a fatal blow to public confidence. This is what prompted the following recommendations in the Congress report of 2017, which could also be applied to Tunisia: appoint an Ombudsman to deal with reports of suspicious practices; provide better training for elected representatives on dealing with businesses; assess the risks of corruption in various existing procedures; and clearly define concepts such as nepotism, conflict of interest, etc., relying not only on standard-setting measures but on a progressive change in practices from the bottom up.
Lastly, drawing on his experience with local elected representatives in Ukraine between 2013 and 2019, Marc Cools (Belgium, ILDG), Congress member and former Chair of the Association of the City and the Municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, stressed the importance of tackling the causes of corruption, such as the very low wage levels and insufficient training of public officials and the inadequacy of municipal budgets.
Preventing corruption at local level in the face of the resistance of the “deep state”
To give an insight into the practical challenges in Tunisia, Imed Boukhris, the head of the INLUCC, and Adnane Bouassida, the President of the National Federation of Tunisian Municipalities (FNCT), gave an outline of the standard-setting measures introduced and the projects run to prevent corruption and improve the ethics of local elected representatives. Setting up an independent institution such as the INLUCC and adopting new statutes for the FNCT in 2019 showed a desire to continue the process of democratisation and decentralisation in Tunisia. However, as Mr Boukhris pointed out, decentralisation also entails the risk of decentralising corruption, hence the importance of experimental schemes such as the islands of integrity set up in co-operation with the UNDP, but also the establishment of a national governance benchmark certificate (RNG) designed to consolidate professional integrity and ethics based on a participatory approach to governance at local and regional level.
Adnane Bouassida pointed out that all these piecemeal measures failed to form a cohesive national whole: only 9 of the 38 implementing decrees for the Code of Local Authorities had been promulgated to date. The resistance of the “deep state” to the process of decentralisation and democratisation cultivated a state of mind which regarded corruption as part of the legitimate machinery of public administration. This was borne out by the expert views of Professor Moktar Lamari, whose study and surveys in Djerba showed that corrupt practices were entrenched in a society in which civil servants were very badly paid and bribes and abuse of power were a common mode of operation by the authorities while nepotism was not thought of at all as a reprehensible act. To counter resistance to change, the UNDP’s Islands of Integrity project, presented by Ms Thouraya Bekri, who is the co-ordinator of this programme in Tunisia, proposes a methodology based on the evaluation of corruption risks and the implementation of new preventive practices drawing on the experiences of pilot sites within public services and institutions, using a model which will gradually be expanded.
In conclusion, all the participants agreed that managing corruption at local level through standard-setting alone is inadequate and ineffective. Effective corruption prevention calls for a complex methodology which implies co-operation between various local, national and international stakeholders, capable of working together to instigate and implement a lasting change in practices. The Congress’s support forms part of this process and bolsters the efforts of Tunisia’s local elected representatives.
This webinar is part of the South-Med Partnership programme adopted by the Congress in 2017, the purpose of which is to support territorial reforms and strengthen decentralised governance in beneficiary neighbouring countries. This programme contributes to implementing the local and regional dimension of the Council of Europe policy towards neighbouring regions, in particular the Neighbourhood Partnerships with Morocco and with Tunisia (2018-2021). The activities organised in this framework benefit from financial support by Liechtenstein, Norway and Spain.
