Depuis le milieu des années 1990, plus d’une dizaine d’instruments internationaux destinés à lutter contre la corruption transnationale ont été adoptés. À l’échelle mondiale, la multiplication des échanges commerciaux a rendu nécessaire la mise en place d’une coopération interétatique susceptible de répondre à l’essor de la criminalité transfrontalière. En outre, l’harmonisation des législations, par le biais d’engagements internationaux contraignants, se présentait comme le seul moyen de réduire les distorsions de concurrence. Un retournement s’est ainsi opéré : l’autorisation implicite, voire la promotion des « frais commerciaux exceptionnels », a cédé la place à la criminalisation de la corruption transnationale.À l’échelle de l’Union européenne, la réalisation du marché unique et l’ouverture des frontières justifient l’adoption de plusieurs instruments spécifiques. Toutefois, les États membres refusent d’abandonner le droit de punir — ou de ne pas punir — prérogative régalienne qui constitue l’un des attributs de la souveraineté. L’harmonisation des législations européennes a par conséquent été influencée par la problématique plus large d’un droit pénal de l’Union européenne en construction. Les dispositions destinées à lutter contre la corruption sont enfermées dans des instruments de nature intergouvernementale et sont strictement limitées afin de faire échec à l’éventualité d’une « communautarisation rampante ».Quinze ans plus tard, la mise en œuvre de la législation anticorruption demeure inégale et l’ineffectivité de la répression en Europe contraste avec les lourdes condamnations des entreprises européennes par des juridictions étrangères. La stratégie initiale, qui ne comprend aucun mécanisme de suivi afin d’assurer une pression permanente sur les États membres, montre ainsi ses limites et s’avère incapable de répondre aux enjeux actuels.La présente étude cherche à appréhender les nouvelles dynamiques anticorruption au sein de l’espace de liberté, de sécurité et de justice au lendemain de la « dépilarisation » opérée par le traité de Lisbonne. Elle met en exergue l’émergence d’une lutte contre la corruption à deux vitesses. Ainsi, l’intégration de la lutte contre la corruption au niveau supranational devrait, à moyen terme, se limiter à la protection des intérêts financiers de l’UE : elle se traduit, d’une part, par l’adoption d’une directive d’harmonisation du droit pénal substantiel et, d’autre part, par la mise en place d’un procureur européen garantissant une répression effective. Au-delà de cet objectif isolé, le « paquet anticorruption » de la Commission européenne n’amorce pas la rationalisation nécessaire du cadre juridique actuel. La pierre angulaire de la nouvelle stratégie est limitée à l’adoption d’un mécanisme d’évaluation périodique afin de susciter, par le biais du droit souple, un surcroît de volonté politique de la part des États membres.Aussi, dans une démarche prospective, la présente thèse tend à démontrer que l’Union européenne constitue le niveau adéquat pour mener la lutte contre la corruption. Toutefois, son rôle moteur ne peut se réaliser, dans sa dimension tant répressive que préventive, qu’à travers l’incrimination de l’eurocrime de corruption. / Since the mid 1990s, more than ten international instruments aimed at fighting foreign bribery have been adopted. Globally, the increased trade has necessitated the establishment of an interstate cooperation likely to respond to the growth of cross-border crime. Furthermore, the harmonization of legislation, through binding international commitments, was the only way to reduce distortions of competition. A turnaround has thus been made: the implicit authorization, or sometimes even the promotion, of ‘exceptional commercial costs’, has been replaced by the criminalization of bribery.At the European Union level, the single market and open borders justify the adoption of several specific instruments. However, Member States refuse to give up the right to sanction – or not to sanction – which is one of the attributes of sovereignty. The harmonization of anticorruption legislation was therefore influenced by the broader issue of a European criminal law. The provisions intended to fight corruption are enclosed in intergovernmental instruments and strictly limited in order to thwart the possibility of an unwanted ‘communautarisation’.Fifteen years later, the implementation of anti-corruption legislation remains uneven and the ineffectiveness of repression in Europe contrasts with the heavy sentences of European companies by foreign courts. The initial strategy, which includes no monitoring mechanism to ensure constant pressure on Member States, shows its limits and is unable to meet the current challenges.This study seeks to understand the new anticorruption dynamics within the area of ​​freedom, security and justice after the ‘depilarisation’ made by the Lisbon Treaty. It highlights the emergence of a two-tier approach in the fight against corruption. The integration of the fight against corruption at the supranational level should, in the medium term, be limited to the protection of the financial interests of the EU: it translates, firstly, by the adoption of a new directive aimed at harmonizing substantive criminal law and, secondly, by the establishment of a European public prosecutor ensuring effective prosecution. Beyond this single goal, the ‘anti-corruption package’ of the European Commission does not initiate the necessary rationalization of the existing legal framework. The cornerstone of the new strategy is limited to the adoption of a periodic evaluation mechanism in order to generate, through soft law, additional political will on the part of Member States.In a forward-looking approach, this thesis suggests that the European Union is the appropriate level to lead the fight against corruption. However, its central role can only be achieved through the criminalization of corruption as a eurocrime.

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The thesis investigates corruption and the anti-corruption strategies. Focusing on the case study of Ukraine, it is shown how corruption can affect society and what particular measures can be undertaken for tackling this phenomenon. It is illustrated that the current level of corruption in Ukraine is high in all fields of public management: the customs and taxation systems, law enforcement agencies, the judicial system, business, and so on. The analysis of the Ukrainian government's anti-corruption strategies reveals that they are based primarily on deregulation, demonopolization, the creation of a strong institutional environment, and digitalization. In recent years, Ukraine has been able to achieve institutional advancements through the creation of new anti-corruption bodies and has initiated digitalization as a new strategic direction against corruption. However, none of these activities have brought tangible results so far. The thesis analyzes why the government's anti-corruption strategies have been fruitless to date and how the situation might develop in the future. Keywords anti-corruption strategies, bribery, corruption, European Union, institutional reforms, public officials, Ukraine. Abstrakt Práce zkoumá korupci a protikorupční strategie se zaměřením na případovou studii Ukrajiny. Je...

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

Les États ont depuis de nombreuses années incriminé la corruption des agents publics nationaux. La crise de l'énergie de 1973 et la fin de la guerre froide de 1989 ont néanmoins stimulé l'apparition d’une forme spécifique de corruption jusqu’alors passé sous silence par les textes juridiques : la corruption d’un agent public étranger. La lutte contre la corruption des agents publics étrangers a récemment connu un essor international normatif considérable notamment avec l’entrée en vigueur de plusieurs conventions internationales à visée régionale et universelle. La genèse de cette réaction internationale est avant tout d’inspiration étatsunienne. Promulgué aux États-Unis en 1977 dans le sillage de l’affaire du Watergate, le Foreign Corrupt Practices Act fut la première loi nationale incriminant la corruption d’un agent public étranger. Cette loi est progressivement devenue la matrice des textes internationaux ultérieurs. La lutte contre la corruption internationale doit faire face aux difficultés de mise en œuvre qui sont inhérentes à l’application des conventions internationales. Il est parfois estimé que ce dispositif juridique international n’est pas toujours d’une efficacité parfaite. Un premier niveau de recherche qui consiste à opérer une analyse des textes juridiques, conduira à étudier la dimension opératoire des dispositifs en vigueur. A la lumière des avis des praticiens contemporains de lutte contre la corruption, un second niveau d’analyse complétant le premier aura pour objectif final de formuler des propositions d’amélioration des mécanismes juridiques existants en droit international positif. / States have criminalised the corruption of their national public officials for many years. The 1973 energy crisis and the end of the Cold War catalyzed however the increase of a specific form of corruption which had been until that point largely ignored by the legislators: the corruption of a foreign public official. The combat against the corruption of foreign public officials has recently witnessed major international normative developments notably with the entry into force of several international conventions at regional and global levels. The genesis of this international reaction can largely be attributed to the United States. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was signed into law by President Carter in 1977 becoming the first national legislation criminalising the corruption of foreign public officials. This law progressively became the template of the future international texts. The fight against this form of corruption faces many of the enforcement difficulties which are inherent to the application of international conventions. The efficacy of the international legal framework can logically be questioned. A primary analysis of the pertinent legal instruments will therefore attempt to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of this framework. In the light of the opinion of various experts in the combat against corruption, a second level of analysis which completes the first shall formulate proposals to improve the existing legal mechanisms in current international law.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

Korruption lässt sich als ökonomische Austauschbeziehung mit den Akteuren Prinzipal, Agent und Klient darstellen. Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, welche Faktoren das Ausmaß der Schädigung des Prinzipals durch Korruption beeinflussen und mit welchen Mitteln der Prinzipal entgegen steuern kann. Neben den Auswirkungen von Kontrollen, Strafandrohung, kulturellen und individuellen Faktoren wird insbesondere der Einfluss der Entlohnungsgestaltung untersucht. Die Zusammenhänge werden mit Hilfe formaler Modelle dargestellt und durch eine Auswertung empirischer Untersuchungen ergänzt.

In many real world situations, especially involving multiagent systems and artificial intelligence, participating agents often need to agree upon a common alternative even if they have differing preferences over the available alternatives. Voting is one of the tools of choice in these situations. Common and classic applications of voting in modern applications include collaborative filtering and recommender systems, metasearch engines, coordination and planning among multiple automated agents etc. Agents in these applications usually have computational power at their disposal. This makes the study of computational aspects of voting crucial. This thesis is devoted to a study of computational complexity of several fundamental algorithmic and complexity-theoretic problems arising in the context of voting theory. The typical setting for our work is an “election”; an election consists of a set of voters or agents, a set of alternatives, and a voting rule. The vote of any agent can be thought of as a ranking (more precisely, a complete order) of the set of alternatives. A voting profile comprises a collection of votes of all the agents. Finally, a voting rule is a mapping that takes as input a voting profile and outputs an alternative, which is called the “winner” or “outcome” of the election. Our contributions in this thesis can be categorized into three parts and are described below. Part I: Preference Elicitation. In the first part of the thesis, we study the problem of eliciting the preferences of a set of voters by asking a small number of comparison queries (such as who a voter prefers between two given alternatives) for various interesting domains of preferences. We commence with considering the domain of single peaked preferences on trees in Chapter 3. This domain is a significant generalization of the classical well studied domain of single peaked preferences. The domain of single peaked preferences and its generalizations are hugely popular among political and social scientists. We show tight dependencies between query complexity of preference elicitation and various parameters of the single peaked tree, for example, number of leaves, diameter, path width, maximum degree of a node etc. We next consider preference elicitation for the domain of single crossing preference profiles in Chapter 4. This domain has also been studied extensively by political scientists, social choice theorists, and computer scientists. We establish that the query complexity of preference elicitation in this domain crucially depends on how the votes are accessed and on whether or not any single crossing ordering is a priori known. Part II: Winner Determination. In the second part of the thesis, we undertake a study of the computational complexity of several important problems related to determining winner of an election. We begin with a study of the following problem: Given an election, predict the winners of the election under some fixed voting rule by sampling as few votes as possible. We establish optimal or almost optimal bounds on the number of votes that one needs to sample for many commonly used voting rules when the margin of victory is at least n (n is the number of voters and is a parameter). We next study efficient sampling based algorithms for estimating the margin of victory of a given election for many common voting rules. The margin of victory of an election is a useful measure that captures the robustness of an election outcome. The above two works are presented in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, we design an optimal algorithm for determining the plurality winner of an election when the votes are arriving one-by-one in a streaming fashion. This resolves an intriguing question on finding heavy hitters in a stream of items, that has remained open for more than 35 years in the data stream literature. We also provide near optimal algorithms for determining the winner of a stream of votes for other popular voting rules, for example, veto, Borda, maximin etc. Voters’ preferences are often partial orders instead of complete orders. This is known as the incomplete information setting in computational social choice theory. In an incomplete information setting, an extension of the winner determination problem which has been studied extensively is the problem of determining possible winners. We study the kernelization complexity (under the complexity-theoretic framework of parameterized complexity) of the possible winner problem in Chapter 7. We show that there do not exist kernels of size that is polynomial in the number of alternatives for this problem for commonly used voting rules under a plausible complexity theoretic assumption. However, we also show that the problem of coalitional manipulation which is an important special case of the possible winner problem admits a kernel whose size is polynomial bounded in the number of alternatives for common voting rules. \Part III: Election Control. In the final part of the thesis, we study the computational complexity of various interesting aspects of strategic behaviour in voting. First, we consider the impact of partial information in the context of strategic manipulation in Chapter 8. We show that lack of complete information makes the computational problem of manipulation intractable for many commonly used voting rules. In Chapter 9, we initiate the study of the computational problem of detecting possible instances of election manipulation. We show that detecting manipulation may be computationally easy under certain scenarios even when manipulation is intractable. The computational problem of bribery is an extensively studied problem in computational social choice theory. We study computational complexity of bribery when the briber is “frugal” in nature. We show for many common voting rules that the bribery problem remains intractable even when the briber’s behaviour is restricted to be frugal, thereby strengthening the intractability results from the literature. This forms the subject of Chapter 10.

This diploma thesis analyses the current state of corruption in the Czech Republic. Primarily I focus on public administration and public sector, however I seek a comprehensive view on the issue in my thesis. The first part presents the theoretical approaches to corruption, bureaucracy and public administration, lobbying, interest groups etc. The practical part deals with methods of measuring corruption, the position of the Czech Republic against other states, legal specification of corruption and the impact of corruption in the states economy. Furthermore, I present causes of origin and spread of corruption and analyse current and planned instruments of government anticorruption fight in combination with the activities of organizations dealing with corruption. The aim of my thesis is to determine whether the current anti-corruption steps are properly set and whether those steps are actually implemented.

Korruption lässt sich als ökonomische Austauschbeziehung mit den Akteuren Prinzipal, Agent und Klient darstellen. Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, welche Faktoren das Ausmaß der Schädigung des Prinzipals durch Korruption beeinflussen und mit welchen Mitteln der Prinzipal entgegen steuern kann. Neben den Auswirkungen von Kontrollen, Strafandrohung, kulturellen und individuellen Faktoren wird insbesondere der Einfluss der Entlohnungsgestaltung untersucht. Die Zusammenhänge werden mit Hilfe formaler Modelle dargestellt und durch eine Auswertung empirischer Untersuchungen ergänzt.:1. Einleitung 2. Korruption als gesellschaftliches Phänomen 3. Verbreitung und Auswirkungen von Korruption 4. Korruption als ökonomische Austauschbeziehung 5. Wirkung von Aufdeckungsmechanismen und Bestrafung 6. Individuelle und kulturelle Ein üsse auf die Korruptionsentscheidung 7. Korruptionsvermeidende Entlohnungsverträge 8. Zusammenfassung