The global corruption barometer

This article has been prompted by the importance of the provisions of the treaty for the accession of Romania to the European Union, which contains safeguard clauses and transitory measures, as well as the specific provision that, if serious deficiencies exist in adopting and applying the acquis in the fields of economy, internal market and justice and internal affairs, heavy sanctions can be adopted. In this respect, the accession also had a series of specific accompanying measures, instituted in order to prevent or to remedy various deficiencies in the fields of food safety, agricultural funding, judiciary reform and fight against corruption. For the last two components, a mechanism for cooperation and verification has been established, while defining specific objectives to create the necessary framework for monitoring the progress made in these fields. This mechanism has been instituted for improving the functioning of the legislative, administrative and judiciary systems and to remedy the serious deficiencies of our country in the fight against corruption. The goal of the cooperation and verification mechanism is to ensure the adoption of the measures necessary to guarantee that the administrative and judicial decisions, norms and practices in Romania correspond to those in the rest of the EU. The goal of the article is to make a statistical analysis of the Global Corruption Barometer of Romania in comparison with the other countries of the EU and the rest of the world, to identify the progress made by our country in the reform of the judiciary and in the fight against corruption. The main subject of the scientific research is determined by the necessity to allow citizens and enterprises in Romania to enjoy the benefit of their rights as EU citizens, because without irreversible progress in these fields, Romania risks being incapable to correctly apply EU law. Practice reveals that the concrete results of the preemptive measures adopted by public institutions are hard to assess without analytical instruments integrated in the informative/sensitizing campaigns carried out thus far. An ample, EU-funded anticorruption campaign, equipped with all the concepts necessary to draw a clear image of the state of the preemptive and combative actions carried out both in the public and private fields, are at the present juncture in only an incipit phase and require the adoption of urgent measures for implementing operational plans which will finalize the actions carried out thus far. Within the article, the GCB analysis ranks the countries according to the degree in which the existence of corruption is perceived in the public sector by public officials and politicians, based on the data concerning the corruption that exists at a given time, data which are obtained from specialized surveys carried out from the perspective of at least three sources.