International anti-corruption norms : their creation and influence on domestic legal systems

289 Pages·2015·3.24 MB·English

by  Rose

INTERNATIONAL ANTI-CORRUPTION NORMS

International
Anti-Corruption Norms
Their Creation and Influence on
Domestic Legal Systems
CECILY ROSE
Leiden University
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Cecily Rose 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2015
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Crown copyright material is reproduced under Class Licence
Number C01P0000148 with the permission of OPSI
and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944918
ISBN 978–0–19–873721–6
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For my parents, James and Alison Rose

Foreword
Governmental corruption, in the words of Pope Francis, is the ‘gangrene of a
people’, poisoning its economic and political life and the faith in the notion of
public service that is the lifeblood of human flourishing. But despite the magni-
tude of the harm that it inflicts on the well-being of societies, the risk that it poses
to the stability of states and to international peace and security, the provisions
of international criminal law directed towards it, and the rise in relation to it of
innovative forms of international standard-setting and enforcement, public-sector
corruption is only relatively rarely the focus of international legal scholarship.
Even rarer, in spite of a welcome trend towards the study of how international law
plays out in the domestic setting, is sustained analysis of the national implementa-
tion of international anti-corruption obligations and their hortatory counterparts.
For these reasons alone, the following monograph would be welcome. The value,
however, of Cecily Rose’s book lies in much more than its subject-matter.
The undogmatic yet discerning outlook that Dr Rose brings to her material
is exemplary. Readers exasperated by doctrinaire accounts of the complex and
often confused phenomenon of ‘soft law’ will find her judicious via media refresh-
ing, avoiding as it does both the jurisprudential laxity of the concept’s most avid
boosters and the tendency of its sworn enemies to throw the baby of experiential
evidence out with the bathwater of legal informalism. Similar good judgment
characterizes Rose’s conclusions. Her nuanced claims are the more persuasive for
their wariness of extrapolation to the seductive ‘big argument’.
Of even more interest than their tenor, however, is the content of the book’s
conclusions. Although formal juridical distinctions retain their intrinsic and
other virtues, in the present case especially in the interstate context, the practical
significance of the ‘hard’/’soft’ dichotomy in international normativity is lessened
to the extent, in the words of Rose’s findings, that ‘the capacity of non-binding
instruments to influence domestic legal systems’ may be ‘as great if not greater’
than that of binding instruments. When it comes to the link between the effi-
cacy of an international norm and its legitimacy, the book points soberingly to
instances of an inverse relationship between the effectiveness and inclusiveness of
international standard-setting. At the same time, it highlights examples where a
balance of sorts appears to have been struck.
What follows promises as much to general international lawyers as to those
international lawyers and scholars of international relations alike, with a specialist
interest in public-sector corruption. It is my great pleasure and privilege to com-
mend it to them.
Professor Roger O’Keefe
London
July 2015

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my PhD supervisor, Professor James Crawford, for his wisdom
and guidance, and to my PhD examiners, Professors Roger O’Keefe and Joost
Pauwelyn, for their thoughtful comments that contributed to this book. I also owe
many thanks to my friends and colleagues who listened to me talk about my ideas,
spared some time to discuss them with me, commented on my writing, and sent
me news about corruption-related developments: Michael A Becker, Fernando
Lusa Bordin, Daniel Costelloe, Emma Dunlop, Caroline Henckels, Jonathan
Ketcheson, Aloysius Llamazon, Hikmat Maleh, Viren Mascarenhas, Timothy
Meyer, Francesco Messineo, Federica Paddeu, Jonathan Rose, and my colleagues
at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University. Finally,
I thank my parents, James and Alison Rose, for always encouraging me, and Erik
Koppe, for his confidence in me.