A CONSTRUÇÃO DO REGIME INTERNACIONAL DE COMBATE À CORRUPÇÃO: O PAPEL OCDE.

Abstract

The theme of corruption entered the international agenda and started to integrate the academic field of international relations recently, more precisely since the 1970s when the United States passed the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act (FCPA), a law with extraterritorial dimensions that criminalized the payment of bribery to foreign public officials. Ever since, states were pressured by the American superpower to create international instruments to curb corruption along the lines of the FCPA. However, the anticorruption began being constructed in the mid- 1990s, almost twenty years after the FCPA. Currently, there are conventions and recommendations in several international organizations, but, because of American and other powerful nations interests, the regime faces standardizing difficulties, as well as problems in its evolution due to a conflicting principal dichotomy within the regime. On one side is the antibribery principal, represented mainly by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, and on the other side is the anticorruption principal, represented mainly by the United Nations Convention against Corruption. The interests of the developed states have been reached with the consolidation of the antibribery principal within the OECD. This is one of the reasons why negotiations on treaties and conventions with a broader scope on corruption have been hampered by these states, hindering the establishment of the anticorruption principle. The objective of this study is to analyze the existence of this conflicting dichotomy of principals through a comparative between the OECD and the UN conventions and their monitoring systems. Therefore, a cost-benefit analysis of corruption on domestic and international relations and an examination of the history of curbing corruption in the international system will be conducted in order to better comprehend the interests and consequences of corruption in the international relations. In the end, it is pointed out the necessity of building a broader anticorruption regime, not just a regime based on the antibribery principle.