Very little progress has been made in shoring up Bangladesh's accountability and transparency institutions since 2008, a report released Wednesday by the US-based Global Integrity (GI) said. "An ombudsman agency focused on investigating a wide range of concerns, not simply taxes (as is currently the case), still needs to be set up and operationalised," it said. The report said: "Ongoing political meddling in the Anti-Corruption Commission, such as the forced resignation of its chair by the ruling party in 2009, undermines the agency's ability to carry out its investigations." The judiciary continues to be ineffective largely because of extremely weak conflicts of interest regulations. The GI, however, expressed the hope that the recent gesture by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to publicly declare his assets would set a precedent for judges in the lower courts. The judiciary's legitimacy is also undercut by political interference in its hiring practices, an example being the government's quota initiative to appoint 101 justices and magistrates in the lower courts from the children of freedom fighters. The implementation of Bangladesh's Right to Information Act 2009 has been slow, in part because of poor records, lack of public awareness, and weak capacity, leaving personal relationships with high-ranking officials the preferred modus operandi to accessing government information, the report mentioned. In its global release, the GI said Egypt's performance on key anti-corruption and transparency measures fell consistently from 2006 through the end of 2010, putting increased pressure on the country's already fragile governance environment in the run-up to the January 2011 revolution, a new study has found. Similar weaknesses were discovered across a range of other countries and territories in the Middle East and North Africa including Yemen, Morocco, and the West Bank. The report, based on a major investigative study of 36 countries, was released by the GI, an award-winning international non-profit organisation that tracks governance and corruption trends globally. "The findings for a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa, both in our 2010 data and looking back several years, paint a disturbing picture," said GI's Managing Director Nathaniel Heller. "Countries in the region universally struggle on implementing even the most basic anti-corruption and transparency safeguards, such as ensuring access to government records, protecting an independent media, debating budgets in a transparent manner, and enforcing conflicts of interest safeguards to ensure that public officials do not benefit financially from their positions in government," said Heller. "With rare exceptions, the Middle East and North Africa is a black hole when it comes to good governance. Perhaps Egypt should have surprised us only in that the revolution took so long to happen."
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