Global Policy Forum

Kim Kyung-ho

An international conference on corruption and ways to combat it started a four-day session in Seoul yesterday with the attendance of more than 850 participants from 115 countries around the world. The 11th International Anti-Corruption Conference will be followed by the 3rd Global Forum on Fighting Corruption and Safeguarding Integrity, which will be held at the same venue of the COEX convention center May 29-31. Under the theme of "Different Cultures, Common Values," participants in the 11th IACC will discuss ways to achieve the common goal of uprooting corruption and building an accountable and transparent society.

Their discussion will particularly focus on corporate governance, corruption in health services and pharmaceutical companies, the expanding role of e-governance and its implications and the strengthening of ethics as an antidote to corruption.

"The idea of a clean, accountable and fair society is a common value that we all hold, and a common goal to which we all aspire," said Justice Minister Kang Kum-sil in her welcoming speech at the start of the opening plenary session.

"All of us need to eradicate corruption from our lives and to create a better world tomorrow," she said. Barry O'keefe, an Australian justice who serves as chairman of the IACC Council, chaired the opening plenary session in which three key-note speeches were given by Kuraiti Murungi, Kenyan minister of justice and constitutional affairs, Hans Kung, former professor of ecumenical theology at Tubingen University in Germany, who heads the Global Ethic Foundation, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, chairman of the International Association for Human Values in India.

Participants will hold two plenary sessions discussing profit making with integrity, and the relation of state and civil society today and tomorrow before adopting the "Seoul Recommendations" at the closing plenary session Wednesday.

During the conference, they will also attend 60 workshops divided into 12 streams such as private sector governance, building ethics in the real world, public sector governance, the political economy of corruption and international instruments to combat corruption.

President Roh Moo-hyun attended an opening ceremony and reception held at the COEX grand ballroom after the first day of the conference co-organized by the Korean government and Transparency International, the world's leading nongovernmental organization fighting corruption. During the ceremony, three anticorruption fighters were awarded the 2003 TI Integrity Awards. The awardees were Dora Akunyili, director general of the National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration in Nigeria, Sua Rimoni Ah Chong, former controller and chief auditor of Samoa, and Anna Hazare, an Indian campaigner against corruption. The IACC, which has been held biennially since 1983, is the largest global anticorruption event in which participants attend in their individual capacities.

The Global Forum on Fighting Corruption and Safeguarding Integrity, which was launched in 1999 in Washington under the auspices of the U.S. government, is an intergovernmental conference held at the ministerial level.

Prominent attendants at the third GF, which will immediately follow the 11th IACC, include OECD Secretary-General Donald Johnston, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, U.N. Undersecretary-General Dileep Nair, Saudi Arabian Justice Minister Abdullah Al Shiek and Harada Akio, prosecutor general of Japan.

U.S. President George W. Bush and Javier Solana, secretary-general of the European Union Council, are also scheduled to send video messages for the opening ceremony, said Justice Ministry officials organizing the forum.

Participants in the three-day forum are expected to adopt a declaration pledging to strengthen efforts and intergovernmental cooperation for uprooting corruption, they said. President Roh plans to speak during the closing plenary session of the forum.

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