On 20 May 2025, a TINZ team joined other civil society representatives meeting with the visiting review team considering New Zealand’s implementation of its commitments under the United Nations Convention against Corruption.
UNCAC is the only binding global anti-corruption instrument instructing nations on how they should address corruption.
Whilst reviews against UNCAC should occur every five years, New Zealand’s current review was delayed by COVID and the general UNCAC timelines. This is the “2nd review cycle” which evaluates corruption prevention provisions -transparency and accountability- as well as asset recovery.
Our global Transparency International body and other civil society organisations such as the UNCAC Coalition are advocating strongly for more meaningful civil society involvement. As a result there is increasing acceptance by the 188 UNCAC nations that civil society participation in assessing and preventing corruption is essential.
We spent more than two hours with the visiting panel, which comprised country representatives from Solomon Islands and Iceland (each from the respective Ministry of Justice), as well as expert advisors/facilitators from UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime).
The civil society attendees mostly knew each other as we have been involved in similar exercises such as Open Government Partnership. The TINZ team consisted of Julie Haggie, CEO, and directors Derek Gill and Jeff Galt Others attending were Tim Kuhner from Auckland University, Andrew Ecclestone from NZ Council for Civil Liberties, Keitha Booth, from Keitha Booth, from School of Government, Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington and Simon Wright from Trust Democracy.
TINZ’s extensive submission on the UNCAC chapters being reviewed was based on strong contributions from a team of 15 Board members, Members with Delegated Authority and expert advisors. We are also grateful for the pre-meeting support of the UNCAC Coalition.
The attending parties were well informed. There was plenty of robust comment especially around weak legislation, conflict of interest, poor efforts at facilitating public participation and weak implementation of the Official Information Act.
We continue to advocate to the Ministry of Justice and the New Zealand government to sign up to the UNCAC Transparency Pledge. This would result in greater transparency of the full report produced from the review process, and more extensive involvement of civil society, business, media, academia and other stakeholders in the UNCAC review process into the future.
If the government agrees to publish the report, it may still be a year or more before the public see it, as there is a fair bit of back and forth between the review team and the assessed country.
