STA, 5 October 2021 - Slovenia has failed to satisfactorily implement or address any of the 15 recommendations the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) made in its 2018 evaluation report. The country has partly implemented only one recommendation, the Council of Europe's (CoE) anti-corruption body says in its latest compliance report on Slovenia.
The recommendations from the fifth-round evaluation report, released 8 March 2018, concerned the prevention of corruption and encouragement of integrity in top government officials and law enforcement agencies.
GRECO now says that Slovenia has made very limited progress concerning top government officials as it has only made some efforts to raise awareness about integrity, while not introducing any internal mechanism to encourage awareness-raising.
The country has meanwhile failed to address a number of other issues - increasing staff and funds, improving a procedure of the national Commission for the Prevention of Corruption (KPK), tightening lobbying and employment rules for when an official's employment terminates, expanding the need to declare assets to include family members, adopting an umbrella integrity plan for the public administration or organisational strategies to address the conflict of interests.
It has neither made any progress in the timely publication of declared assets of ministers and state secretaries, substantive checking of these assets, or violations regarding assets declaration.
The country's efforts in the field of the police have also been rather limited, says the report Greco adopted at the end of October 2020 but only released on Tuesday.
Despite introducing some legal changes to police organisation and work to better manage corruption risks, no tangible results have been achieved.
There has also been no progress in ensuring that promotion and dismissal procedures in the police are fair, merit-based and transparent.
GRECO, however, noticed some positive steps towards encouraging women to join the police force and employing them in it.
The evaluation report thus concludes that progress is needed for Slovenia to show an acceptable level of compliance with the recommendations in the coming 18 months, and urges Slovenia to draft a second report on the situation to include the potential progress by 30 April 2022.
Transparency International (TI) Slovenia is not surprised by the findings, arguing that fighting corruption is not a priority of decision-makers, which the report only corroborates.
"Although these findings are almost a year old, and there has been some progress later on, which the report does not cover, the general impression from the past few years is that the fight against corruption is at the bottom of the list of priorities of decision-makers," the NGO wrote in a response for the STA.
TI would like to see not only a more comprehensive reform of legislation but also more preventive activities to strengthen oversight institutions and the civil society, where the trend is negative, "since the society's ability to fight against corruption is decreasing with the attacks on journalists, NGOs and media".
The Commission for the Prevention of Corruption said it expected that the authorities would take a more active approach in implementing the recommendations.
Despite the numerous examples of best practice in this field implemented by individuals bodies and organisations within the public sector, there has been (almost) no progress in implementing these recommendations, it added.
"This progress is even more important in the current circumstances, when new corruption risks related to the anti-epidemic measures taken by the government are being detected, and when the trust of public in the most senior public office holders attaining ethical standards is low."
