LIDS Global

LIDS is proud to announce the publication of Volume I of LIDS Global’s international research efforts for the 2013-2014 academic year. Check out the full text of this exciting, collaborative research project on the LIDS Global page and stay tuned for information about how to get involved in 2014-2015!

Last year, LIDS Global embarked on an ambitious, pilot initiative to facilitate collaborations with development-focused student groups outside of the United States. Groups from law schools in Singapore, Tanzania, India, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka formed the inaugural LIDS Global research teams and Volume I presents a compilation of outstanding research from the first four schools. The upcoming publication of Sri Lanka’s innovative contribution will mark the beginning of work on Volume II.

The topic of Volume I, corruption, is a follow-up to a 2012-2013 LIDS white paper that was published in the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Magazine, “Access to Remedies for Transnational Public Bribery.” The white paper proposed that victims of corruption in developing countries should receive compensation for their injuries through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the U.S. anti-corruption statute.

While the main argument of the paper explored the need for more robust transnational compensation, the paper left significant unanswered questions related to how compensation should be distributed. The differential impact of corruption in various countries and non-civil suit alternatives for combatting corruption also lay beyond the scope of the initial white paper.

As a result, LIDS global developed a research plan, inviting law students from partner schools to address at least one of the white paper’s gaps with respect to corruption in either their countries or geographic regions. Each contribution to Volume I is expansive and ambitious. Indeed, corruption is a multi-faceted challenge that can only be overcome by broad cooperation and free thought.

Accordingly, the LIDS Global product is greater than the sum of its parts. It adds substantially and uniquely to the discourse on transnational anti-corruption and we all look forward to continuing our efforts this year!

The following are brief descriptions of each paper:

National University of Singapore

Our partners at the National University of Singapore have provided an excellent in-depth look at the success of their country’s own anti-corruption laws and their potential for improving the development prospects of Singapore’s neighbors, and they conclude that Singapore’s robust anticorruption laws are guiding Southeast Asia to a cleaner future. The authors respond directly to the “Access to Remedies” LIDS white-paper, finding that compensation for victims is, at this time, unworkable and unnecessary in the Singaporean context. Indeed, the best way to facilitate relief to citizens of “demand-side” countries is to set a good example for their own governments.

University of the Philippines Student Organization for Law and International Development (U.P. SOLID

U.P. SOLID ambitiously proposes a private right of action (as opposed to a cause of action) for any citizen to sue corrupt actors on behalf of the government. This model is based on the “derivative lawsuit” model found in many corporate legal codes, but it specifically rejects providing compensation for “victims.” Instead, the disgorged funds would be returned to the government. This is a specific proposal to involve the public in the fight against corruption.

University of Dar es salaam, Tanzania

Our partners at UDSoL were in the unique and invaluable position of being able to directly evaluate the effectiveness of providing access to remedies for victims of corruption. In a widely publicized case, BAE was fined millions of pounds for bribery that corrupted Tanzanian government officials. The UK’s Serious Frauds Office decided, in 2012, to send nearly thirty million pounds of the disgorged funds to bolster the Tanzanian government’s education budget. The student researchers concluded that this was not an appropriate solution, and that future efforts to compensate victims of corruption should involve local civil society.

National Law School of India University, Bangalore

This team chose to tackle one of anti-corruption’s most complex problems—deciding where corruption stops and legitimate political activity begins. This age-old debate takes on special relevance in India’s contemporary political climate, but it is nonetheless highly instructive for citizens of any democracy. As activists around the world rally to the anti-corruption cause, identifying it as a main impediment to development, it is useful to remember that developed countries can also feature nepotism and political horse-trading—indeed, that is the unfortunately transcendent nature of corruption that the team from India delineates in their paper.

Transparency is a foundational element of development—without it, the citizens of emerging economies cannot participate in keeping their governments and markets fair and accountable. Of course, governments and market participants are also entitled to a measure of privacy. The trick is in finding the balance, both in substantive law and in fact. In 2014-2015, LIDS Global is going to organize an international research effort to explore this balance.

LIDS Global, as was noted in this blog just a few weeks ago, is this organization’s effort to build partnerships with like-minded student groups all around the world. Our 2013-2014 pilot project was highly successful; LIDS Global coordinated teams from around the world as they explored the link between corruption and development. The finished work will be published later this month.

Building on this success, our 2014-2015 research will focus on the Freedom of Information and its role in development; specifically, how can citizens all around the world use Freedom of Information laws to deter corruption in government officials? In fact, our idea to explore this topic is partly a result of the 2013-2014 research: students from the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka identified the Freedom of Information as a top development priority in the Asian region.

Here at Harvard, others were also focused on this key element. Professor Matthew Stephenson’s Global Anticorruption Blog published several posts that called for using the Freedom of Information to deter corruption on the “demand” side (meaning the government officials that demand bribes in the first place, as opposed to the “supply” of the businesses that pay for them).

One post, written by Argentine legal scholar Ignacio Boulin-Victoria (LLM ’14), provocatively proposed using Freedom of Information laws in developed countries to extract information about corrupt “demand-side” officials that could be used to shame or prosecute them in their home countries. The rationale here is simple: prosecuting agencies in the United States, for instance, come to possess information in the course of a corruption prosecution that could also be used to clean up government and markets in developing countries. Why not get that information to people who can use it, such as civil society and prosecutors in those developing countries?

Imagine, for instance, that the Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted a major multinational telecom company for bribes paid in several Eastern European nations. The telecom company has already settled with the DOJ and paid its fine; presumably it and its peers are now deterred from making future bribes in those countries. But what happened to the corrupt officials that demanded the bribes in the first place? Oftentimes, nothing happens to them—they simply continue demanding bribes until another MNC pays them.

Why aren’t the corrupt officials punished for their actions? Mr. Boulin-Victoria believes that one big reason is that, even though the DOJ may pass information off to the prosecuting agency in the “demand-side” country, there is simply not enough pressure on that agency to bring a case against government officials in its own country. Mr. Boulin-Victoria argues that, if only civil society in that country were empowered with the same information that the DOJ has, then the citizens of that country could be empowered to hold their own government officials accountable—and their prosecutors.

If a lack of information to civil society in the “demand-side” country is the problem, then civil society in developed nations can help by extracting the key information and then simply passing it off to their foreign counterparts. Seems simple, right?

As Mr. Boulin-Victoria and others on the Global Anticorruption Blog acknowledge, however, this plan is not without potential flaws. Most obviously, if prosecutors in a “demand-side” country do not respond to public pressure, or if public pressure does not materialize, then nothing new will come of this plan. For instance, using the example of the DOJ’s prosecution of an telecom-MNC in Eastern Europe, it is not immediately obvious that passing information about corrupt officials to civil society in those countries will actually yield high-level prosecutions—citizens in those countries may already be aware that their government officials are corrupt, journalists and private attorneys may be easily intimidated by defamation laws, and prosecutors may be completely captured in any case. Another problem: what if the DOJ doesn’t give up the information, citing an exception to the Freedom of Information Act?

LIDS Global, now coming into its second year, is perfectly suited to explore this proposal. Our network of student groups in several nations around the world enables us to understand legal and social conditions “on the ground.” Here in the U.S., our LIDS Global team will research Freedom of Information Act implications of this plan, and potentially develop a “tool-kit” for U.S. attorneys to use if they actually wanted to test this plan out.

It’s going to be an exciting year for LIDS Global and its partners!

Tag: LIDS Global

Announcing the Release of LIDS Global Volume I!

The Freedom of Information, Development, and LIDS Global’s 2014-2015 Research Project