Question

Article on fighting against corruption of about 120 words

Answer 1

Most legal systems are traditionally familiar with the offence of corruption. It was conceived as an offence against public order (infraction contre l’ordre public), which allowed sanctioning behaviour by public officials who misused their public office in exchange for undue advantages and the behaviour of private persons aimed at inducing public officials into this type of behaviour. The French Napoleonic Code pénal of 1810 introduced tough penalties to combat corruption in public life and as such constituted the legal epitome of the modern, nineteenth-century State’s concern to make public officials' misuse of their offices a serious offence against public confidence in the administration's probity and impartiality. After the French revolution, the political idea that government powers are derived from the people and hence should be used only to the interest of the people became firmly entrenched. It is this fundamental modern, democratic political concept, which lies at the basis of the criminalisation of corruption.

However, the concept of people’s sovereignty was not only a democratic one, but also a nationalist one, as governmental power was almost exclusively exercised in the framework of the nation state. In this nineteenth-century model, both the preventive and the repressive goals of this offence were limited to national civil servants. The corruption of foreign officials was considered not reprehensible, or, at any rate, not worth bothering about and international officials hardly existed at that time. This narrow scope of the domestic incriminations of corruption was also reflected in the absence of jurisdiction provisions that would have allowed to take action against corruptive behaviour outside the national territory, certainly if this behaviour was aimed at corrupting foreign officials. This was only the logical consequence of the narrow concept of corruption as an offence that was aimed at safeguarding the integrity of the national civil service. More generally speaking, it reflected the overall nineteenth-century approach to (criminal) law, which was seen as an instrument exclusively aimed at the protection of the interests of the state and its nationals.