In the first place, over 65 publications in foreign languages released in 2020 have been inserted to the existing thematic sections.
In the second place, Russian and foreign books and academic articles on two new topics – entrapment and education – have been added to the list.
Education is an important element of anti-corruption infrastructure. It favours the spreading and internalization of values and standards of conduct, allow public officials to understand the essence of the requirements of anti-corruption legislation and how they are related to the real life. International organisations are paying ever more attention to anti-corruption education these days. For instance, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime is implementing the “Education for Justice” initiative (E4J), the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group (ACWG) focused one of the sessions of its second meeting in 2020 on anti-corruption education, and the Russian Chairmanship in the BRICS Working Group on Anti-Corruption Cooperation identified anti-corruption education as one of its priorities and is organising a thematic round table on 1 December 2020. At the same time, the establishment of an effective system of anti-corruption education is a rather challenging task: it is necessary to strike a balance between theory and practice in the content of learning programmes, determine the optimal duration and methods for preparation of different target audiences. These and other issues are addressed in the publications the links to which are now available on this Portal.
Entrapment, in a broad sense, is a situation created by law enforcement and other public bodies and sometimes even by other citizens and entities (for example, the media) which “enables” the commitment of corruption offences up to direct offering of a bribe to public officials with a view to subsequently exposing offenders and often to even convicting them. The admissibility of such methods has been discussed both in Russia and in foreign countries for many decades. On the one hand, most countries consider entrapment undesirable or unacceptable. The European Court of Human Rights has a negative attitude towards this practice. On the other hand, even in those countries where entrapment is prohibited, it is not always unequivocally separated from other authorised sting operations. Moreover, a number of high-profile anti-corruption investigations (such as operations ABSCAM and Greylord in the U.S.) resorted to entrapment, meanwhile in some countries it is used to test someone’s integrity which makes it a true instrument for countering corruption. The Portal now provides an extensive list of publications devoted to different aspects of this complex topic.