Cambodia among the countries placed on "Grand corruption watchlist" ... where "For my friends, everything they want. For my enemies, the law."

Click on the graph to zoom in (Graphic by Global Integrity)

Excerpt from Global Integrity Report: 2008
http://report.globalintegrity.org/globalIndex/findings.cfm#WatchList

NEW FOR 2008: "Grand Corruption" Watch List

Beginning in 2008, Global Integrity began looking for possible triggers of in the countries assessed in the Global Integrity Report — "grand corruption"countries where certain key anti-corruption safeguards were so weak that the risks of large-scale theft of public resources was greater than in most countries. We looked in our data for three red flags: extremely poor conflicts of interest safeguards in government, weak oversight over large state-owned enterprises, and poor or non-existent controls over the flow of money into the political process. Our rationale was simple: "follow the money" from commercial and special interests to politicians (through political contributions), and then assess whether those officials were sufficiently constrained by conflicts of interest regulations to effectively regulate the large state-owned enterprises whose revenue everyone is after. If those data (our Government Accountability, State-Owned Enterprises, and Political Financing categories) were all "Very Weak" (below 60), those countries were placed on the Watch List.

Being placed on the Watch List does not necessarily mean that grand corruption and looting of public resources will always take place in the country, but rather that the risks may be significantly higher than in most countries.

The 2008 Grand Corruption Watch List includes: Angola, Belarus, Cambodia, China, Georgia, Iraq, Montenegro, Morocco, Nicaragua, Serbia, Somalia, the West Bank, and Yemen.

Promoting governance and anti-corruption reforms in Watch List countries will be extremely challenging until fundamental changes take place. In countries such as the West Bank and Iraq, the lack of basic security will need to be addressed before accountability measures can be successfully implemented. In other countries, including Angola, Cambodia, and China, effective one-party rule stands in the way of moving forward with setting up the basic checks and balances that are crucial to decreasing discretion and increasing transparency in the way government functions.

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Cambodia: Country highlight

Cambodia suffers from a range of governance and anti-corruption challenges, including vote-buying and political financing scandals to privatizations that have tended to favor a small group of wealthy elites. Media independence is compromised by self-censorship: a common occurrence in most media houses. Judicial appeals offer little redress for most citizens or small businesses: "For politically-related [court] cases, the following is the rule of thumb: For my friends, everything they want. For my enemies, the law."