Oslo - July 8, 2010 - Together with Global Witness, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee and the Eurasian Democracy Initiative, Freedom House held a side event on the margins of the 19th Session OSCE Parliamentary Meeting in Oslo, Norway today attracting interest from delegates of multiple OSCE member states. Conistent with the assembly's theme of 'Rule of Law: Combatting Transnational Crime and Corruption,' representatives of these four NGOs called on the delegates to take concrete steps to fight rising corruption in the OSCE region precisely because it undermines democratic governance in multiple forms.
Freedom House's senior program manager for Eurasia, Sam Patten, pointed to how corruption is not a relative term, not without victims nor without remedies drawing specific examples in Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine and Georgia while other NGO representatives also addressed its systemic influence in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and elsewhere. Citing the 2010 Nations in Transit report, Patten explained how corruption corrodes democratic governance, the free press and independent judiciary processes.
U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, joined the NGOs at the event and lauded them for raising these issues. Together with Senator Cardin, the NGO representatives responded to questions from delegates and the media about the planned OSCE Summit, freedom of religion in Kazakhstan, and legislation on the floor of the U.S. Senate to require energy companies to disclose payments made to foreign governments. Following the side event, Patten gave interviews to the BBC on the harshening of Azeri journalist Enulla Fatullayev's prison sentence on trumped up charges and likened it to other pushback against indpenednet journalists and human rights defenders, like Kazakhstan's Evgeniy Zhovtis.
