Spain maintains the same score as last year in perception of corruption, but falls one place in the world ranking, according to the Corruption Perceptions Index and criticized by the NGO that produces it, Transparency International.
The country had been losing positions among the best-rated countries for two years, and now maintains the previous score (60 points out of 100), although in the
ranking
of 180 States analyzed
It drops one place (from 35 to 36), four if the 2020 report is taken as a reference. It falls behind Lithuania and Portugal, the two closest EU Member States on the list, and remains only one position behind. above Botswana.
Transparency International denounces that to reverse the general downward trend described since 2020, a country “requires substantial efforts” to improve its institutions, its laws and its jurisdiction.
And he details that, in addition to legislative reforms, Spain specifically needs to improve institutional functioning, with the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary, which remains in the country's debt for another year, and which has been pending for four years and whose members They already double their expired mandate.
But the recently published report but referring to the year 2023 not only points to the reform of the body of judges, but also advocates, to reduce corruption in the public sector, that the Transparency Law be reformed, the
golden visa
or golden visas —which grants residence in Spain to large investors from outside the EU, launched in 2013 within the Entrepreneurs Law and when the worst economic crisis in decades hampered employment and growth figures—, of the that last year the NGO already regretted that there was no central registry of its owners.
The report urges, for Spain to climb positions again after so many years of decline, to improve parliamentary transparency, create an independent authority to protect
whistleblowers,
informants who leak data that reveal illegalities, a figure that is protected by the EU and which the country incorporated, with additions, into its national regulations last February.
He also understands and remembers that Spain lacks “impulse” to regulate a mandatory registration of interest groups, a measure that it already mentioned in its report for 2022.
Transparency highlights that Spain's brand fell seven points between 2012 and 2018, with an improvement, which was later revealed only punctually, in 2019. The current score, 60, is five points below that of 2012. As detailed in the report, “it can only be stated that there is a significant improvement in a country's position when it manages to continuously raise its score in consecutive years.”
And he warns that the country "should not settle for its current position (...) below countries that two years ago were clearly far from its position, such as (...) Israel or Cape Verde."
Both countries now surpass Spain, which shares points with Latvia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
Spain's result is part of an average decline, unprecedented in a decade, of the countries of Western Europe and the European Union, which achieve a score of 65 out of 100, although it is still the world region that achieves the best marks in the index.
Part of the drop is due to the worst score recorded by Sweden (82), the Netherlands (79), Iceland (72) and the United Kingdom (71), which the NGO highlights as the lowest since the study began. , in 1995, the result of 13 surveys and evaluations prepared by specialists that were later unified.
Only six of the 31 countries in this group improve, compared to eight that get a worse grade;
Among them, the lowest, 42 points, falls on Víktor Orban's Hungary.
The global region with the worst rating is Sub-Saharan Africa (33 points).
However, several European countries occupy a good part of the top of the
ranking
, led by Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway and Singapore, States that also demonstrate the good functioning of their justice systems, and this is measured in another index by the same NGO. .
In the last car are Somalia, Venezuela, Syria, South Sudan and Yemen, several of them mired in armed conflicts, a cause that Transparency International uses to partly explain its poor results.
And to understand countries more generally, the report details that democratic countries generally tend to outperform authoritarian countries when it comes to controlling corruption.
Among the former, those that are considered full democracies achieve an average score of 73 —that is, 13 points higher than Spain—, while failed democracies remain at 48 and undemocratic regimes, only 32.
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