A New Human Right to Freedom from Corruption

In the long battle against corruption, the last 20 years or so has yielded a number of international legal and institutional initiatives -- most notably, the OECD Bribery Convention and the UN Convention Against Corruption; regional anti-corruption conventions (in both Africa and the Americas); and the Financial Action Task Force; as well as a swathe of political responses, from G8 and G20 statements and UN resolutions, to civil society campaigns and organizations such as Transparency International and the World Economic Forum’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative. In terms specifically of human rights, however, the response has not progressed far beyond baseline analyses of the negative human rights impacts of corruption and calls for that much to be recognized in efforts designed to combat corruption. What, in particular, is missing is any concerted effort to assess what precisely international human rights law could do to promote those efforts and what tangible added value a human rights approach might offer. The proposal advanced in this paper is intended to fill that gap. While it takes the form of an international human rights law instrument, it is nevertheless meant to supplement these other responses, not to replace or oppose them. What I am suggesting is that there ought to be recognized a specific, free-standing human right combatting corruption -- that is a "right to freedom from corruption" (RFFC) -- at the level of international law. As such, and like all international human rights laws, it would demand implementation in domestic jurisdictions, while providing normative guidance and supervision at the international level. This paper outlines (i) why we need such a new right, (ii) what form it should take and (iii) whether it would work in practice.