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The veil of secrecy: Is the fight against corruption being undermined by the lack of open justice?
January 28, 2020 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Free
International Pathway College Lecture
Over the course of the past year, Corruption Watch has been advocating for open justice reform, and carrying out a programme of court monitoring, which includes attending all major foreign bribery hearings in England.
This work – along with interviews with journalists, public officials and lawyers – has allowed us to identify a number of areas where open justice is lacking, including court lists that have resulted in vastly reduced media coverage of corruption trials, and secretive procedures, like Unexplained Wealth Orders, which are taking place without any civil society or press scrutiny. This report makes a series of recommendations to increase open justice in the court system as well as prevent anti-corruption enforcement in the UK being weakened by a lack of transparency. Drawing on this experience Andrew will discuss this and other issues related to the UK government’s involvement in the global arms trade.
About the speaker
Andrew Feinstein
Andrew Feinstein was a facilitator in the constitutional negotiations process that led to the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, when he was elected an ANC Member of Parliament. He served as an MP for more than seven years – on Parliament’s Finance committee, serving as Deputy Chair of the country’s Audit Commission and as the ranking ANC member on the key financial oversight body, the Public Accounts Committee. He resigned in protest when the Public Accounts Committee was prohibited from investigating a massive arms deal involving several European companies that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption.
His critically acclaimed book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, was first published in late 2011 and a full-length documentary film based on the book was released to critical acclaim in 2016. He is currently CFO of Corruption Watch, a London-based, global anti-corruption NGO with a special focus on the arms trade.